From China, portrait of trauma and family

When Fang di (Wen Qi), a cascade performer who broke into a journey in the Chinese painful film industry, see his cousin Tiana Tiana (Liu Haocun), their re -merging is a charged thing. The actress has not talked to her younger cousin for five years. He is also not in contact with the rest of their family. He is a cursed child running away from a toxic home. It can manage their sense of freedom, to release from guilt and anger.

IN Girls on the wireVivian Qua builds a sensitive portrait of two women trying to overcome the family trauma. The film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the competition, extends to the topics presented in Qu Angels carry white. Festival success and critical recognition of previous films qu Girls on the wire will surely find fans at the Arthouse audience in the US

Qu is focused in ways that young women underestimate society. But u Girls on the wire She also notes that the domestic sphere lays the foundation for this exploitation. The younger lives of Fang di and Tian Tian are shown through a series of flashback, whose dreamy and nostalgic atmosphere (cinema of Zhang Chaoyi) has glued to the volcanic reality. While Fang Di’s mother struggles to save her clothing factory, her brother, Tian’s father Tiani (Zhou Ti), does little to restrain his drug addiction. The brothers and sisters are trapped in restless addiction, the one where the sister, as if fulfilling the Faust’s offer, funded his brother’s bad habits. While their parents are fighting, young Fang di and Tian Tian seek comfort in the company of each other.

Moving the past with today’s gathering of relatives, Quads an intimate narrative of how the trauma pierces through generations. She considers that two people can come out of the same environment differently, and her attention to scars in the gentle relationship of Fang di and Tian Tiana is particularly affected.

Qu is also interested in the dynamics of the “Film City” in which Fang Di works. The director sets humorous pieces in a built city, which allows it to experiment with the genre and compare the fictional tension of a false place with the right drama emotionally tense relationships. But this research undermines the sharpness Girls on the wireAdding a third, more opaque thread, two clearer films.

Girls on the wire begins with the escape of Tiana Tiana. The young woman, who kept a mysterious figure against her will, kills her Cartor and runs into the night. With a blunt cut (editing Yang Hongyu), we dived into the event events, where Fang di struggles with a touching director, seeking to make another action sequence. The fate of the two relatives is converged in the too obviously thoughtful way: Tian Tian, ​​who somehow gets a job as a messenger near the studio, brings a package to his cousin.

The initial encounter is frost. Fang Di rejects his cousin because Tian Tian just wants money. But the performer of cascades and inspiration is not the actress. She is still obsessed with her family’s legacy, who has slowly paid off over the years. Tian Tian insists on this, with heart despair, that he does not want the money. She just wants to re -establish a relationship with her cousin, who is a functional sister. They used to be so close, she thought at one point. What happened?

Qu using this question, meant through the first meeting of Tiana Tiana and Fang di after five years of alienation to start flashback in Girls on the wire. The director, who also wrote the script, rewind the contemporary story in the 90’s, where in the carefully portrayed and colorful scenes she watches the family problems of Tiana Tiana and Fang di -a.

The relationship between Father Tiana Tiana and mother Fang di is particularly persecuted, as it emphasizes the complex effect of drug abuse and uneven gender dynamics. Mother Fang di -a may be a foster parent, supporting her parents, brother and brother’s child, but that does not apply to respect. The father of Tiana Tiana, so undergoing drug addiction, is a unstable force whose wavy mood commands the household. In the midst of this domestic stress, Fang Di keeps Tian Tian safe and distracted. Scenes of older cousins ​​covering their younger ears while their parents fight or persecute each other through a clothing factory, underline their intimacy.

Ruptures in their relationship occur over the years. In every flashback, they make the story progress, showing that Fang di and Tian Tian are worn with their worrying circumstances. While Fang di strives for life outside the home, Tian Tian accepts a fate in which he ends up his father’s similar father. In one memory, Fang di returns home from college to find Tian Tian pregnancy with a child. The father of the child and the father’s family refuse to help a young woman she sees as one -time use. In the end, Fang di, frustrated by the decision of his cousin to keep the child and determined to protect himself, cut off from the family.

The painful echo of these decisions explain in today’s narrative, in which the quara reconciliation of relatives. Qi and Hoocun give performances that have interfered with tonal shifts in this time lane. While relatives respond with each other, three mafios, sent by a mysterious lender, find them. (An interesting but insufficiently explored element of the film are mafia relationships and how it seems that everyone owes money to the same person.)

Q struggles to balance the melodrama of the relatives of Sororal stories with the comic rhythms of these men from the mafia integrated into the City Studio. The humorous pieces where three men end up as additives in the scene clash with the muffled emotion of Tiana Tiana and Fang, who cried after opening the old wound. These narrative choices also make the transition to the past a little more clumsy, especially as the role in today’s thread increases.

Qu’s ambition to mix the genres is wonderful, and there are moments in Girls on the wire When humor complements sadness in a way that feels true to real life. But for the second time, details of the fictional studio world – the environment of demanding directors, overcrowded crews and punishments – make an interesting story than the central one.

Still, stronger elements Girls on the wire – Especially how Qu makes emotional and psychological costs of freedom – let’s be curious to see what the filmmaker is doing next.