Innocent Prisoners

无辜囚徒

China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 99 mins.

Director: Dai Wei 戴维.

Rating: 3/10.

Child-abuse PTSD meets the office rom-com in a good-looking but hopelessly soupy mash-up.

STORY

Chengdu city, Sichuan province, southern China, 2017. Lu Jing (Tong Yixuan), 27, is a successful department head at an interior-design company but is still emotionally traumatised by being sexually abused some 20 years ago by Qin Gang (Zhao Hongji), head of a textile factory at which her mother, Li Yunzhi (Zhong Xiaodan), was an accountant. Emotionally cold and always, for some reason, wearing black gloves, she’s disliked by her workmates (who think she’s either arrogant or a lesbian), takes out her anger in furious MMA workouts, and is obsessed with tracking down Qin Gang to make him pay. The only person to whom she shows any warmth is her housemate/tenant Song Qingge (Luan Leiying), a painter and fellow abuse victim, who engages in multiple boyfriends to put her past behind her. Wang Chao (Shi Yuanting), a playboy interior designer who’s suddenly returned from the US, is made general manager of the design company by his cousin Zhou Rui (Luo Chang), who owns it. He immediately sets his sights on Lu Jing but she’s not interested. One night, however, the two go for a drink and Lu Jing, heavily intoxicated, spews out her past to him. Song Qingge hears that her stepfather, who abused her as a child, has died; but she refuses to forgive him, despite entreaties by her mother. Later, she invites round Wang Likun (Peng Wuhui), a boyfriend she recently ditched, and tries to get him to have sex with her, but he refuses. After sending a farewell text to Lu Jing, Song Qingge drowns herself in the bath. Heartbroken, Lu Jing returns to tracking down Qin Gang, who had been sentenced to prison more than a decade ago for fraud but is now out. Wang Chao, who’s even taken up MMA to get closer to her, now helps. And then Lu Jing gets a tip-off on Qin Gang’s current address.

REVIEW

Child sexual abuse and an office rom-com make uneasy screen partners in Innocent Prisoners 无辜囚徒, which bills itself as “China’s first film on the survival of sexually assaulted children into adulthood”. It’s the first theatrically released feature by Anhui-born film-maker Dai Wei 戴维, 40, following his likeable soccer movie The Running Boys 奔跑的少年, a slickly-mounted “follow your dream” Uyghur kids movie that ended up online via the Tencent platform in Oct 2019. Equally well-mounted, but set in high-end Chengdu rather than the wilds of Xinjiang, Prisoners‘ apparent sincerity is scuppered by a half-serious, half-light tone that can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. Box office was microscopic.

The film comes complete with statistics at the end, plus a general message that, though you should never forgive your abuser, you must forgive yourself as you are blameless. That’s all very fine, but the script by pseudonymous, 35-year-old Chongqing writer Liao Zuoyou 廖左右 (“Left-Right Liao”) can’t think beyond genre stereotypes: her main character, a late-20s yuppie designer, walks around in designer-butch duds and black gloves, has an extremely close BFF-ship with her housemate (also an abuse victim), scowls at everyone (not just men), and after 20 years is still so consumed by interior rage that she indulges in furious MMA gym workouts. At home during the night, she sits on an ice bag to douse the fire between her legs, while her housemate – who bounces from man to man as a way of working out her problem – beats her own genitalia in frustration. Really.

Between all this, the main character is romanced by her office boss, a serial lothario who just won’t give up and (ah!) becomes reformed in the process. Almost. Dai, a onetime visual-effects whizz (especially in 3-D and 4-D), packages Liao’s soupy script with handsome widescreen images by d.p. Zhao Chunfeng 赵春峰 (often in well-composed long takes), smooth editing by Tao Cheng 陶程 (The Running Boys) but often wildly inappropriate music by Mao Hui 毛慧.

Actress Tong Yixuan 童苡萱, 30, largely performs with a one-note scowl that would be better for an avenging-angel action movie. Actor Shi Yuanting 史元庭 brings a sunny insouciance to the role of the office lothario that’s completely at odds with the parallel film that Tong is performing in. Luan Leiying 栾蕾英 is little more than decorative as the heroine’s artistic BFF.

CREDITS

Presented by Sichuan Blossom of Banyan Tree Pictures (CN), Sichuan Yingshi Cultural Media (CN). Produced by Sichuan Blossom of Banyan Tree Pictures (CN).

Script: Liao Zuoyou. Photography: Zhao Chunfeng. Editing: Tao Cheng. Music: Mao Hui. Art direction: Zhang Ziyu. Costume design: Zhang Feiyan, Yu Rong, Shen Ting. Styling: Zhi Tianhua. Sound: Xing Ding. Action: Jing Zimo, Yang Qichong. Visual effects: Li Rongsheng. Executive direction: Yang Qichong.

Cast: Tong Yixuan (Lu Jing), Shi Yuanting (Wang Chao), Luan Leiying (Song Qingge), Zhong Xiaodan (Li Yunzhi, Lu Jing’s mother), Luo Chang (Zhou Rui), Zhao Hongji (Qin Gang), Zhang Hongbo (Qin Xiaoming, Qin Gang’s son), Peng Wuhui (Wang Likun, Song Qingge’s ex-boyfriend), Wang Jing (KK), Yi Jianmin (Pang Yan, psychologist), Li Yunling (bureaucrat), Zou Kaixun (Xiao, manager), Jing Zimo (MMA trainer), Yan Peilin (Xiaolan), Zhang Jiaqi (young Lu Jing), He Xinyi (young Song Qingge).

Release: China, 7 Aug 2020.