We Girls
向阳•花
China, 2025, colour, 2.35:1, 122 mins.
Director: Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚.
Rating: 6/10.
Odd-couple friendship between two female ex-cons is often surprisingly tender, though it’s over-long and the plotting is sometimes too manufactured.
STORY
Liujiang city, somewhere in central China, c. 2012, summer. Twelve female inmates are selected by the prison’s education department to form the Sunny Flowers Performance Team 向阳花演出队 for family visiting day during the mid-autumn festival. They are put together in one cell (No. 9, Block 2) and the chief corrections officer, Deng Hong (Chuai Ni), assigns one of them, Hu Ping (Wang Ju), as their head monitor. As well as Hu Ping, who is in for drug offences, the motley group includes the well-behaved Gao Yuexiang (Zhao Liying), 28, who’s been sentenced to two years and four months for doing online porn, and the truculent Mao Amei (Lan Xiya), 18, who’s grown up in a gang of street thieves and has the same sentence for theft. Mao Amei is a deaf-mute, and Gao Yuexiang volunteers to be her interpreter as she knows some sign language from dealing with her own daughter, who’s also deaf. When another new prisoner, Mu Guiqin (Li Huijun), in for child trafficking, starts a fight with Gao Yuexiang, Mao Amei helps the latter and the two women start to bond. The team is coached in singing and dancing by a teacher from the city’s cultural centre (Luo Yining); but on the day Gao Yuexiang starts crying thinking about her daughter and a fight breaks out between Mao Amei and Hu Ping when the latter tries to pull Gao Yuexiang up by her hair. Mao Amei and Gao Yuexiang are sentenced to solitary confinement; meanwhile, Deng Hong visits Gao Yuexiang’s lame husband, Bao Gen (Zhang Shili), and learns he abandoned their daughter outside an orphanage one day. Two years later, when Gao Yuexiang and Mao Amei are released, Deng Hong tells the former that her daughter is in an orphanage and her husband has been imprisoned. Gao Yuexiang visits the orphanage but, with no address or regular income, is not allowed to reclaim her daughter. Mao Amei is met by Huang Mao (Wang Xiaoyu), her best friend in the gang of thieves led by Lao Die (Qian Yi); when she makes it clear she wants to go her own way from now on, Huang Mao gives her a phone before an emotional parting. After various separate adventures, Gao Yuexiang and Mao Amei meet by chance in the street where the latter is running a begging scam. Gao Yuexiang suggests they share a cheap flat, and both take a succession of promotional jobs to make some money. Gao Yuexiang simply wants to make enough to get her daughter out of the orphanage and give her a cochlear implant. (She had previously worked as an online porn star, White Fox, to try to pay for the latter.) Eventually the two dress up as police officers and try to extract money from Hu Ping’s family; later they get into a violent argument with one promoter and have to flee, subsequently having yet another argument that almost breaks their friendship. While running another begging scam in the street, a passer-by, Guo Aimei (Cheng Xiao), recognises them and has them arrested. But Guo Aimei has a minor criminal record of her own, and her probation officer is Deng Hong. The later comes to the police station, recognises Gao Yuexiang and Mao Amei, and helps them get a respectable promotion job. However, the two friends start arguing again – and then Gao Yuexiang makes a surprising discovery about Mao Amei.
REVIEW
Contrary to the impressions given by its poster art (see above, and left), We Girls 向阳•花 is neither a women-in-prison movie nor an intense psychodrama. Instead, this latest outing by veteran Mainland film-maker Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚 is an often tender examination of an edgy relationship between two very different women who meet and bond in prison and are later thrown together by chance as they try to forge lives in civvy street. After an initial run of wry comedies like Be There or Be Square 不见不散 (1998) and Cell Phone 手机 (2003), Feng, now in his late 60s, has been much more unpredictable in his choice of subject-matter during the past two decades, and We Girls again breaks new ground for him, with its setting on the edge of society and almost none of the ironic humour that’s in most of his movies.
Despite strong performances by its majority female cast – and especially by leads Zhao Liying 赵丽颖 (also one of the producers) and Lan Xiya 兰西雅 – it doesn’t quite come off as it should, with a running time that could easily lose 15-20 minutes (especially from its second half) and a plot that’s too manufactured rather than evolving in a more natural way. After the box-office flop of his last feature, If You Are the One III 非诚勿扰III (2023, RMB102 million), Feng’s fortunes recovered slightly with We Girls’ much more polite RMB230 million. However, that was still a long way behind his mega-hit, Youth 芳华 (2017, RMB1.42 billion) and still less than his other film of recent years, the under-rated love story Only Cloud Knows 只有芸知道 (2019, RMB364 million).
The screenplay is based on a short story, 女监里的向阳花，开出高墙外 (literally, “Sunny Flowers in a Women’s Prison Bloom outside the High Walls”), that was originally published online in 2019 and then in a 2024 book collection with the less-than-snappy title 教改往事 (“Past Events of Educational Reform”, see left). Author Chong An 虫安 – pen name of Nanjing-born Xia Longlong 夏龙龙, in his mid-30s – also collaborated with Feng on the script, which sticks fairly closely to the original story, at least in the first part set in the prison. (Chong An himself served seven years in prison for robbery, and had trouble adjusting to society on his release, so knows whereof he writes.) But in fleshing out the post-prison struggles of the two women to make a living, the script resorts too often to genre elements, as well as flashbacks and repeated arguments and makeups between the two women, that have a manipulative feel.
The first half-hour, set in the women’s prison of the fictional city of Liujiang – somewhere in Hunan province, judging by the dialect – introduces the odd couple of Gao Yuexiang (Zhao), 28, who’s been imprisoned for online porn, and the truculent Mao Amei (Lan), 18, a deaf-mute street thief. The two are thrown together, among a new group of inmates, as Gao Yuexiang knows some sign-language from dealing with her own daughter, for whose ear-operation she was trying to save money by working as an online star. The two are also included in a song-and-dance group, called the Sunny Flowers Performance Team, that puts on a show at the prison’s visiting during the mid-autumn festival. Rehearsing for this – significantly, the actual performance is not shown, only the emotional run-up to it – further helps the two unlikely friends to bond and when, at the end of two years and four months, they’re released on the same day, it’s just a matter of time before the film manoeuvres them to meet again in the outside world.
The subsequent 90 minutes are the heart of the movie, during which they end up sharing a cheap flat, working together as promo girls, and endlessly bickering and making up. Gao Yuexiang is driven by a need to get her young daughter out of an orphanage and have an ear operation; Mao Amei simply wants to make a life of her own away from the gang of young thieves she was raised in. Though the plotting is sometimes laborious in charting the women’s ups-and-downs, it’s made interesting by the performances. Gao initially appears (in the prison scenes) to be the helpful and law-abiding one but turns out later to have a dark side, as a bully and a cheat. The bolshy Mao Amei turns out, in a strange way, to be the more principled of the two – even though, in a neat twist some 90 minutes in, she’s shown to have been keeping a secret from Gao Yuexiang.
Zhao, 37, who’s good in determined roles (Duckweed 乘风破浪, 2017; the deaf-mute in Article 20 第二十条, 2024; desert drama Tiger Wolf Rabbit 浴火之路, 2024) and can even shine in lame fare (The Unseen Sister 乔妍的心事, 2024), handles the complex central role of Gao Yuexiang with subtlety, despite the script’s manipulative construction, while Hubei-born actress-singer Lan, 26, in her first major film role, is just right as the pugnacious but vulnerable street kid, Mao Amei. Also strong is Beijing-born actress Chuai Ni 啜妮 as the prison officer who later becomes involved with them in civilian life; though she convincingly plays an older, more authoritative woman, she’s actually two years younger than Zhao in real life. Smaller roles are well-etched, such as Shanghai-born singer Wang Ju 王菊 (Delicious Romance 爱很美味, 2023) as a cell monitor who gradually softens; singer-actress Cheng Xiao 程潇 is okay as a female ex-con who initially causes trouble for the central pair, though her role (larger in the original short story) is poorly drawn in the screenplay.
Key crew on the film, which was shot in various locations throughout Hunan province (including Changsha city), mark a departure for Feng from his usual collaborators. Convincingly mirroring a hot, humid Hunan summer that underscores the emotions, Chinese arthouse fave Florian Zinke 陆一帆 (who also shot The Unseen Sister) provides a natural look that doesn’t detract from the performances. Piano music by Wang Qianting 王倩婷 is simple and melodic, as invisibly supportive as was her score for The Ex-Files 4: Marriage Plan 前任4 英年早婚 (2023). The film’s title could roughly be translated as “Sunny Flowers”. Feng’s actress wife, Xu Fan 徐帆, is credited with production planning 策划. Though there’s little of Feng’s sarcastic humour in the film, there is one in-joke that refers to his earlier action comedy A World without Thieves 天下无贼 (2004).
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Mayla Cultural Media (CN), Shanghai Such a Good Film (CN), Horgos Lian Ray Pictures (CN), Chongqing New Nautical Films (CN), iQiyi Pictures (Beijing) (CN), China Film (CN), Dongyang Bole TV Services (CN). Produced by Zhejiang Dongyang Mayla Media (CN).
Script: Feng Xiaogang, Chong An. Short story: Chong An. Photography: Florian Zinke. Editing: Fan Zhaoshuo. Music: Wang Qianting. Art direction: Lan Zhiqiang. Costumes: Hu Yunqiang. Styling: Chen Ziqing. Sound: Wu Jiang, Mao Shuo, Li Qing. Action: Jiang Daohai, Wu Xingyu. Visual effects: Li Zhiyong (Bud Vision Beijing). Executive direction: Liu Zuotao.
Cast: Zhao Liying (Gao Yuexiang/Bai Huli/Little Fox), Lan Xiya (Mao Amei/Hei Mei/Inky), Chuai Ni (Deng Hong), Wang Ju (Hu Ping), Cheng Xiao (Guo Aimei), Wang Xiaoyu (Huang Mao), Qian Yi (Lao Die/The Old Man), Li Huijun (Mu Guiqin), Li Hengwei (Li Meng), Zhou Ting (Yang Hua), Li Li (Liu Hui), Liao Qian (Wang Ying), Fu Shiting (Zheng Qi), Hu Yixuan (Ma Linlin), Li Huining (Liu Yuxia), He Qingyan (Chen Xiaoguo), Li Hui (Huang Yu’nan), Luo Yining (Ma, performance teacher), Gan Lu (Qian, section chief), Li Bolin (Liu, officer), Zhang Shili (Bao Gen, Gao Yuexiang’s husband), Yuan Yi (orphanage head), Xiao Shiping (landlord), Luo Sha (pharmacist), Zhu Lianxi (Hu Ping’s grandmother), Yang Yunying (Hu Ping’s grandfather), Liang Xing (Huo Zhe), Chen Guodong (lock-factory owner).
Release: China, 4 Apr 2025.