Hard Times
Huang Ji keeps the best in her Hunan Trilogy for last.
Stonewalling
Directors: Huang Ji, Ryuji Otsuka • Writers: Huang Ji, Ryuji Otsuka
Starring: Yao Honggui, Liu Long, Cui Chu, Huang Xiaoxiong, Xiao Zilong, Mo Zhihong
Japan • 2hrs 28mins
Opens Hong Kong February 22 • IIA
Grade: B+
It must be the unofficial week of structurally rigorous filmmaking because Japan-based husband and wife writing/directing team Huang Ji (originally from China) and Ryuji Otsuka’s Stonewalling | 石門 slots in nicely beside The Zone of Interest as far as form goes. This year’s Golden Horse Best Feature (it was also nominated for directing and screenplay) took a skeleton crew – Huang and Otsuka also co-produced and art directed, and Otsuka also served as DOP, gaffer and designed the damn poster – and shot the drama about a twentysomething woman already at a dead end over roughly nine months in Changsha. There’s a distinctly Jia Zhangke vibe to Stonewalling, which Huang and Otsuka refer to as the third in their loose contemporary China trilogy, after the coming-of-sexual-age dramas Egg and Stone in 2012 and The Foolish Bird from 2017. Non-pro Yao Honggui returns as star, and once again Huang and Otsuka focus on the false promise a young woman in Hunan, and by extension women across the country, is forced to deal with. Huang’s own sexual assault as a young woman in her Hunan home town informs a great deal of the story. Deliberately paced (sometimes it feels like nine months) with observational camera work and a nearly diegetic soundtrack, Stonewalling is a slow burn that’s made more of an impact than you realise by the time the end credits roll, and it’s by far Huang and Otsuka’s most accomplished film.
Lynn (Yao) is a modern, if slightly under-educated, Chinese woman, one of millions stuck trying to make a living in the ever-growing gig economy. The film starts with Lynn and her kinda sorta boyfriend Zhang (Liu Long) at a party with some wannabe influencer types. Lynn is clearly out of place among the budding entrepreneurs, one of whom runs an English language cram school. Everyone seems to be making plans to move out of the country, and when asked where she’d like to go Lynn has no answer. But she’s taking English classes so she can get a flight attendant job, and in the meantime works middling jobs modelling cheap consumer goods and tending after Xinjiang transplants to make ends meet. When she finds out she’s pregnant it throws her meagre future into a black hole of poor choices, shit choices or no choices.
While she deals with an unplanned baby, the little money she earns goes back to her parents (Huang’s parents, Huang Xiaoxiong and Xiao Zilong) in provincial Hunan, to help pay off their debt. Those debts escalate when her mother becomes obsessed with a snake oil Vital Cream – it grows your hair back, it eliminates varicose veins, it cures cancer – Ponzi scheme, and also finds herself on the hook to pay compensation for a miscarriage that resulted from her dodgy “pre-natal clinic” treatments. Lynn’s pregnancy might help: she can sell the baby to the woman who miscarried instead and wipe the debt. Given her skill set, this is probably her best option. She moves back into her parents cramped flat until she comes to term.
Stonewalling is a good name for a film about a young person trying their best to stem the tide of disaster that’s always around the corner. It’s one part character examination of women in a world where autonomy is illusory, and one part social critique (there’s probably a reason the film is technically a Japanese production) of how post-reform market economics and the rise of TikTok-style social media are fucking with the people that have to navigate these fast-moving currents. Especially women. The commodification of the self – Lynn tries selling her eggs before the she opts to pitch the whole baby – in a mercenary society where everyone is out to get ahead by any means necessary, and where women from the less advantaged end of the spectrum (and so-called “left behinds”) are faced with closed doors at every turn are themes Huang has explored before, but Stonewalling is probably her most elegant effort. At well over two hours it’s a bit long, but Yao’s natural performance feels authentic, and Otsuka’s careful compositions put us at the very heart of Lynn’s headspace, whether she’s in shiny Changsha or the more obviously hopeless town she was born in. Stonewalling is cut from the same indie cloth as Jia, Li Yang’s Blind Shaft and Hu Bu’s An Elephant Sitting Still, and anyone looking for an unfiltered exploration of modern China from a POV outside the glittering towers of Shanghai should line up before it pulls a Keyser Söze and poof… it’s gone. — DEK