Angels Wear White
嘉年华
China, 2017, colour, 16:9, 106 mins.
Director: Wen Yan 文宴 [Vivian Qu].
Rating: 7/10.
Naturalistic, affecting study of a teenage drifter whose life is affected by a seaside sex scandal.
STORY
Binhai city, northern China, the present day. Teenager Xiaomi (Wen Qi) works at the seaside Warmness Hotel as a chambermaid, though she has no ID card or residency permit. One evening, while filling in for older co-worker Lili (Peng Jing) who’s skived off for the night, she checks in a local bigwig, Liu Chengzhang, head of Binhai Non-Governmental Chamber of Commerce, who arrives with two 12-year-old girls, Meng Xiaowen (Zhou Meijun) and Zhang Xinxin (Jiang Xinyue). After taking an order of some beer to the girls, she then sees Liu Chengzhang entering their room from his next door. Instinctively she videos the CCTV images on her mobile phone. Next day both girls are punished for being late to school, and during a fight with another pupil Meng Xiaowen reveals she has bruises on her thighs. Zhang Xinxin admits to her mother about where they were that night and both girls undergo a medical examination. Three days after the event, police captain Wang Zhijian (Li Mengnan) questions Lili and Xiaomi at the hotel but Xiaomi says she saw nothing untoward take place. Lili introduces Xiaomi to her petty gangster boyfriend, Xiaojian (Wang Yuexin), who says he can get her an ID card for RMB10,000. Hao Jie (Shi Ke), a lawyer representing Meng Xiaowen, questions Xiaomi who only says she delivered some beer to the girls’ room. Meanwhile, Meng Xiaowen’s mother (Liu Weiwei), who’s raising her daughter on her own, takes out her anger on Meng Xiaowen, who later runs away to stay with her father. Desperate for the money to get an ID card, Xiaomi texts Liu Chengzhang and demands RMB10,000 not to show the police the video she took of him entering the girls’ room.
REVIEW
Four years after her iffy directing debut with mystery-drama Trap Street 水印街 (2013), Beijing-born indie producer Wen Yan 文宴 [Vivian Qu] has a second go behind the camera with the much more successful Angels Wear White 嘉年华, a naturalistic and affecting study of a rootless teenager’s attempts to settle down and build a life. Largely free of the arty affectations that plagued Trap Street – as well as several films Wen has produced, like Night Train 夜车 (2007) and Knitting 牛郎织女 (2008) – and much more emotionally engaging thanks to a well-constructed script and strong performances, Angels succeeds on almost every level where the earlier film failed. On Mainland release it earned some RMB22 million, a reasonable amount for such specialised fare.
Set in the coastal zone of Binhai, southeast of Beijing, the film centres on a sullen drifter, Xiaomi, who’s working at a seaside hotel as a chambermaid. While filling in for a friend who’s taken the night off, she checks in a local bigwig with two 12-year-old schoolgirls in tow and records evidence on her mobile phone that he visited their room during the night. As a low-key police investigation proceeds, Xiaomi tries to stay out of it; all she’s interested in is getting an ID card so she can settle down in Binhai.
Though the film is, on the surface, about the attempted cover-up of an under-age sex crime, its strength is that it’s really about a character on the sidelines who’s innocent of any involvement but whose life is changed by it. The story of the two schoolgirls (well played, especially by Zhou Meijun 周美君 as the maturer of the two) permeates the narrative as they undergo medical examinations, their parents’ lives are affected and the legal process comes into sway. But it’s completely free of any wallowing in emotional trauma: the two girls simply move on with their lives in a very practical way. In contrast, Xiaomi gets deeper and deeper into trouble, lying first to a police detective and then to a lawyer representing the children, and finally blackmailing money from the guilty bigwig in order to buy a fake ID card.
Initially claiming to be 18 but later owning up to 16, Xiaomi is also a portrait of a teenager on the cusp of adolescence, curious about sex but also more focused on her own survival. She expresses no opinion on the crime; for her it’s simply an opportunity to make money, first from the lawyer and later from the guilty party, and to improve her own life. That doesn’t exclude eventually working as a hooker for a local thug who tried to diddle her, though the film’s final image, of her riding away on a scooter in a white dress, shows her again striking out on her own.
As the crime fans out to affect many people in different ways, Wen’s screenplay manages to keep the focus centred on Xiaomi by not letting the sex-crime strand emotionally dominate the drama and by maintaining a naturalistic look to the film that reflects Xiaomi’s drifter mentality. The largely hand-held photography by Belgian d.p. Benoît Dervaux (who began as a camera operator on the Dardenne Brothers’ films) gives Angels an almost European look, as if set in an out-of-season seaside resort on the Atlantic coast rather than northeast China, and the rather on-the-nose use of a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe in her Seven Year Itch pose further underlines the film’s slightly western flavour. But in its deeply practical heart and its survivalist soul Angels is 100% Mainland Chinese.
As the sullen but plucky Xiaomi, Taiwan-born but Suzhou-raised Wen Qi 文淇 (aka Chen Wenqi 陈文淇) is utterly convincing and manages to make a largely reactive, unsympathetic role into something of interest. The 14-year-old actress has already had small parts in films, including the heroine’s teenage self in Blood of Youth 少年 (2016), but this was her first leading role; she’s since followed it with main roles in the period Taiwan crime drama The Bold the Corrupt and the Beautiful 血观音 (2017) and Mainland thriller The Liquidator 心理罪之城市之光 (2017). As the petty gangster who promsies her an ID card, actor-singer Wang Yuexin 王栎鑫 (the male lead in Miss Puff 泡芙小姐, 2018) is equally convincing, as is Peng Jing 彭静 as his bottom-line girlfriend and Xiaomi’s elder work colleague. Giving the film some acting ballast are Geng Le 耿乐 and TV’s Liu Weiwei 刘威葳 as as one of the girls’ parents, and especially actress Shi Ke 史可 as the lawyer who patiently gets the wary Xiaomi to trust her.
The film has no music until the end titles. Its Chinese title is a loan word meaning “Carnival”, and is presumably ironic, like the English title.
CREDITS
Presented by L’Avventura Films (CN), Perfect Pictures & Media Group (CN), Kashi JQ Culture & Media (CN), Hangzhou Chuansheng Cultural Investment Management (CN), Shanghai Moyi Cultural Communications (CN).
Script: Wen Yan [Vivian Qu]. Photography: Benoît Dervaux. Editing: Yang Hongyu. Music: Wen Zi. Art direction: Peng Shaoying. Styling: Wang Tao. Sound: Si Zhonglin, Zhang Yang. Visual effects: A Donglin.
Cast: Wen Qi (Xiaomi), Zhou Meijun (Meng Xiaowen), Shi Ke (Hao Jie, lawyer), Geng Le (Meng Tao, Meng Xiaowen’s father), Liu Weiwei (Meng Xiaowen’s mother), Peng Jing (Lili), Wang Yuexin (Xiaojian, Lili’s boyfriend), Li Mengnan (Wang Zhijian, police captain), Jiang Xinyue (Zhang Xinxin), Chen Zhusheng (Li, hotel manager), Yu Hongzhou (Zhang Xinxin’s father), Dou Xiang (Zhang Xinxin’s mother), Xu Kuan (Li, young policeman), Zhang Guangshun (Sun, waterpark manager), Cao Yunqing (Liu, section head), Chen Jianhua (gift-stall boy), Qi Zhe (laundry boy), Tang Xuan, Dong Zhize (teachers).
Premiere: Venice Film Festival (Competition), 7 Sep 2017.
Release: China, 24 Nov 2017.