by TWY

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The two Chinese short films that appeared in the Semaine de la Critique sidebar continue Chinese cinema’s most depressing cliche: the domination of documentary. Nothing but documentary, nothing but collective traumas, nothing but “reality”, which nowadays is synonymic to nothingness, and in the end, nothing cinema. Or perhaps the European festivals only understand this type of cinema? In Huang Shuli’s autobiographical Will You Look at Me, the director confronts his identity as a gay man and the conflict that creates with his mother; then, in Lin Tu’s Canker, a fiction but glazed with mixed media gimmicks, a young “influencer” confronts the fact that she makes no influences. 

The cinema of modern China built itself on documentary. While filmmakers Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing used their small cameras and guerrilla production to rebel against the nostalgic “Fifth Generation” style, their “realism” creates a perpetual doom on our future filmmakers, even when they attempt to do fiction. Our filmmakers are so fixated on the so-called reality that even fiction must be made “like documentary”: the more grotesque, the more chaotic, the better. There are a lot of pretty images in both films, but the aesthetic shares nothing with their core, which are already in the past even before the films were made. Against the hazy celluloid home movies shot by the filmmaker, Shuli’s mother, in the soundtrack, speaks the tongue of every average Chinese mother (to whom being average is the key to a “Chinese life”), inviting viewers to relive their own trauma. Two vicious circles that each completes the other: they cry, they apologize, but nothing will change, no escape allowed.

And we should be scratching our heads wondering why the very natural actress in Tin Lu’s film must be stranded in this pitiful role, where anything else would make much more interest. But the documentary gesture reigns supreme once again, as we see her struggling to have a “career” as an influencer, trapped inside the livestream page, and with almost everyone that came across her wondering where the fuck her parents are. Always the parents, always mom and dad, never cinema. Is it all we can do? Live through hell, and then sell it on camera as art?