A young Chinese woman is caught between the emotional demands of her mother and daughter in Yang Lina’s take on an all-female dysfunctional family.
Documentarist-turned-feature filmmaker Yang Lina gets close, almost uncomfortably close, to a daughter, mother and grandmother who live together with distaste, neediness and emotional blackmail in, which competed at Rotterdam, Yang examines three generations of women who also represent different eras of Chinese history.
The story is supported by a well-chosen cast headlining Hao Lei, known for her work in several Lou Ye films like, as the 40-ish journalist and single mother Jianbo, forced for economic reasons to share a cramped apartment with her domineering, extroverted mom, played by Hong Kong-Taiwanese actress Elaine Jin Yan-ling. The latter is a subtle sort of drama queen with major anger management issues.
There is a man more or less around the house: the grandmother’s “fiancé” Zhou, who is played by Li Wenbo as a sensitive, caring fellow in love first with Granny, and secondarily with “the mother of my children.” As he says, he’s not perfect, but his role as a peacekeeper is precious to the equilibrium of the family.
Jianbo keeps her private life to herself, especially a moody musician-lover whose bed she shares on occasion. He doesn’t seem too emotionally stable. But she seems to prefer it that way, if only to punish herself. When she gets an prospect of marriage from a normal guy, she gets rid of him with wacky text messages while he’s talking earnestly to her mother. It’s one of the film’s typically funny-painful scenes.
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