Quote:
It’s winter and 22-year-old Muzi has returned to her home town of Hangzhou for a visit, a new year is around the corner. Her parents are long since separated, her father has a wife and young daughter and her mother is dating, though the old family apartment is still furnished as was. Muzi befriends an older bar owner and her university boyfriend comes looking for her, although no relationships here are straightforward. It takes time to work out how everyone connects to Muzi anyway, there are no explanations or introductions and one scene can shift into another without warning, creating ellipses along the way; it’s less about telling a story than capturing a mood, the same sense of melancholy stasis that settles even over the sudden outbursts of feeling. Yet the camera is always active, eagerly seeking out unusual perspectives and subjective impressions: the damp rock in the vast underground cavern, the lights in the winding corridor of the karaoke bar, the mist that forms by the river at night, the texture of pubic hair in bathwater. In black and white, the urban spaces seem even emptier; when the black and white is inverted, the city looks like a far-of planet and maybe that’s the point. “Every time I come back, it’s more different than before.”Read More »
