I came across this film when it was recently shown on Channel 4 here in Britain, and was surprised by it in two ways. The first reason for my surprise was that I did not expect to find a film from the puritanical People's Republic of China dealing with the subject of lesbianism. Presumably it was this unexpected combination of national provenance and subject-matter that persuaded Channel 4 to screen it, because the second reason for my surprise was that I could not understand why a respected broadcaster would bother itself with such an amateurish production.
The central character, Xiao Qun, an elephant keeper at a zoo, is involved in a lesbian relationship with another young woman, Xiao Ling. There are two strands to the plot. One concerns Qun's efforts to hide her lesbianism from her deeply conservative mother, who is determined to get her daughter married before the age of thirty. The second concerns Qun's former lover Junjun, who reappears in her life on the run from the police. These two strands are never integrated well, and the result is that the film is a very uneasy mixture of social comedy and crime drama.
All the roles are played by amateur actors, and it shows. None of them makes any convincing attempt to convey feeling or emotion. Even worse, however, is the embarrassingly bad direction. All the devices with which we are familiar from more professionally made films- the close-up, the zooming shot, the use of cross-cutting from one speaker to another- seem to be absent. The result is that the film seems to consist of a series of conversations, badly lit and shot with a static camera in longshot, interspersed with lengthy shots in which nothing at all happens in the way of either action or dialogue. I can say that this was the most boring film I have seen in a long time. I can only hope that the late hour at which Channel 4 showed it meant that not too many viewers watched it; given the brilliant work being done by the likes of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige I would not like anyone to think that this travesty is in any way typical of modern Chinese cinema. 3/10.
