Vanishing Days
漫游
China, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 94 mins.
Director: Zhu Xin 祝新.
Rating: 3/10.
A lazy-summer meditation centred on a young teenage girl with a fertile imagination is thin fare.
STORY
Hangzhou city, Zhejiang province, southern China, 2009, summer. The weather is especially humid and a storm is brewing. When her father goes away overnight on a short business trip, restless young teenager Li Senlin (Jiang Li) is left with her mother (Chen Yan), idly moving around the flat in rollerskates or working on her summer-vacation school essay about characters in a spaceship. The two are visited by the mother’s friend, Auntie Qiuqiu (Huang Jing), who remembers cradling Li Senlin in her arms when the latter was a baby. After lunch, Li Senlin finds her pet turtle has gone missing and gets her mother and Auntie Qiuqiu to help find it. Drawing a blank, they decide to buy a new one, taking a short cut to the pet shop through a bamboo forest that Li Senlin has never visited before. Inside is a cool cave that her mother goes off to look at. Auntie Qiuqiu talks about her late husband Xiaobo (Li Xiaoxing), who died of kidney failure, and how they both used to work on barges when they were young. After buying a turtle, the three women take a taxi back; during the journey Auntie Qiuqiu whispers to Li Senlin to come and live with her. In her memory Auntie Qiuqiu remembers her times with Xiaobo when they were younger and visiting him in hospital. During dinner at the flat, Li Senlin has a row with her mother and petulantly storms out, going for a walk. After she returns, she and her mother are massaged by Auntie Qiuqiu, who is thinking of opening a parlour. Outside, the storm finally starts.
REVIEW
There’s a good 40-minute short struggling to get out of Vanishing Days 漫游, a lazy-summer meditation on teenage restlessness and imagination that’s way too stretched at an hour and a half. The first feature by Hangzhou-born film-maker Zhu Xin 祝新, 22, after a couple of shorts (Community 午山社区, 2015; A Folk Song 山野之歌, 2015) and the featurette Homesick 嘉年华 (2016), it’s a nice idea that draws inspiration from its setting – a sweltering day in Hangzhou, with a storm brewing that will clear the atmosphere, both literally and metaphorically – and gradually develops a parallel world via its mercurial, 14-year-old lead. Its flaw is that it ultimately doesn’t provide any insights into its main character and leads the viewer up paths that are wilfully obscure. Zhu is undoubtedly a talent to watch but needs to serve up more than a series of film-school affectations to engage an audience over feature length.
Like A Folk Song and Homesick, both also co-written with Dai Ying 戴莹, the film has a strong mystical/dream element and sense of drifting. (The Chinese title literally means “Roaming”.) Li Senlin is a young teen who’s wilful, indulged by her mother, and apparently without any friends of her own age. When she loses her pet turtle, she throws a tantrum and her mother suggests going out to buy another; accompanying them is a visiting family friend, Auntie Qiuqiu, who has a colourful past and whose own memories of her late husband impinge on the girl’s imagination, already stoked by a school essay she has to write during the summer break. (Long extracts from this, involving a journey on some kind of spaceship, punctuate the film, to less and less point.)
That, at least, is what Vanishing Days seems to be about. Dai and Zhu lead the viewer up various paths that may or may not be real, including a boy with the same name as Li Senlin who may represent her alternative existence as a boy rather than a girl, and the auntie who takes on the role of a wish-fulfilment mother, far more interesting than the girl’s actual one. As the three women roam around in the muggy heat, anything seems possible in the girl’s fertile thoughts. But as the father returns from a business trip the following day, life in the family flat returns to the status quo.
As the wilful girl, Jiang Li 姜郦 is convincingly cast but is given little to do beyond tiny tantrums and silent mooning. With the mother (solidly played by Chen Yan 陈燕) a largely neutral figure, the meatiest character is the auntie who sparks the girl’s imagination. But though well played by Huang Jing 黄菁, she’s essentially as big an enigma as the daughter. The film is at its strongest in sequences sketching the atmosphere of a torpid summer day in southern China, with lazy guitar music by Tao Zhen 陶桢 and humid visuals by d.p. Zhang Wei 章炜. For the rest, it’s thin fare.
CREDITS
Presented by Midnight Blur Films (CN), Midday Hill Films (CN). Produced by Midnight Blur Films (CN), Midday Hill Films (CN), Newood Films Crew (CN).
Script: Dai Ying, Zhu Xin. Photography: Zhang Wei. Editing: Zhu Xin. Music: Tao Zhen. Art direction: Chen Xinjialan, Jin Jiacheng. Sound: Zhang Zijie, Wei Shuqian, Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr. Artistic advice: Zhang Lv.
Cast: Jiang Li (Li Senlin, girl), Huang Jing (Qiu Xiuqiu/Auntie Qiuqiu), Chen Yan (Caiqin, mother), Lu Jiahe (Li Senlin, boy), Luo Haiqing (father), Li Xiaoxing (Xiaobo), Jin Hongli.
Premiere: Busan Film Festival (New Currents), 8 Oct 2018.
Release: China, tba.