The Oldtown Girls
兔子暴力
China, 2020, colour, 16:9, 105 mins.
Director: Shen Yu 申瑜.
Rating: 6/10.
Affectingly played daughter-mother drama is weakened by its flashback structure and contrived crime elements.
STORY
A mining town in southern Sichuan province, southwest China, late Sep 2018. Two teenage schoolgirls, Shui Qing (Li Gengxi) and Ma Yueyue (Zhou Ziyue), have been kidnapped, with a ransom demand of RMB2 million and a warning not to go to the police. Shui Qing’s father, Shui Hao (Shi An), and her birth-mother, Qu Ting (Wan Qian), meet Ma Yueyue’s father (Pan Binlong), who says he has enough money to pay the ransom. All three of them are highly stressed. Shui Hao says the kidnappers will kill the girls anyway, so they may as well go to the police. Qu Ting disagrees but is forced to go along with the two men to Daokou police station. As they arrive, Shui Hao receives news that Shui Qing has turned up at home and Ma Yueyue is actually in the provincial capital Chengdu visiting friends. The police say it was probably another prank kidnapping; but they tell Qu Ting to bring Shui Qing to the station next day just for procedure. Qu Ting suddenly becomes hysterical, saying her daughter knows nothing. And then she opens the boot of her car. (Apart from the quiet Ma Yueyue and extrovert Jin Xi [Chai Ye], Shui Qing had few close friends at her senior high school; at home she was barely tolerated by her step-mother [Yang Li]. A few days earlier, she had recognised Qu Ting at a noodle stall in the street. Qu Ting had abandoned her when she was aged only one and gone off to Shenzhen to pursue a career as a dancer; now Qu Ting was back in town. Promising not to force herself on her, Shui Qing had approached Qu Ting and they ended up spending the afternoon together. Qu Ting was temporarily living in an empty theatre on the edge of town. The two women had started seeing each other afterwards; Shui Qing had been happy to have found her birth mother but Qu Ting had been wary of letting her get too close. Also back in town was Ma Yueyue’s father, after a spell working in Chengdu. His daughter had been looked after by her godparents [Fang Li, Nai An], who thought she had potential as a model and wanted to officially adopt her. Despite feeling indebted to them, Ma had politely refused. Meanwhile, Qu Ting had visited Shui Hao at his home, where he was surprised to see her after so long. At her high school, Shui Qing had been asked by her class teacher [Su Bo] whether Qu Ting would help out and choreograph a class routine for the annual arts festival, as the two pupils originally in charge of it, Ma Yueyue and Jin Xi, had done nothing. Qu Ting had agreed, though she warned Shui Qing she was leaving in two days’ time. The unconventional Qu Ting had turned out to become a bit hit with all of Shui Qing’s classmates, and that evening Shui Qing, Ma Yueyue and Jin Xi had spent an evening out with her. Qu Ting and Shui Qing had seemed to really bond as mother and daughter. But next morning a gangster, Du [Huang Jue], had turned up from Shenzhen giving Qu Ting three days to pay back some money she’d borrowed in the city before running off. Suddenly, Shui Qing had seen her mother in a completely different light.)
REVIEW
A lonely teenager tries to bond with her birth mother she never knew in The Oldtown Girls 兔子暴力, which is affectingly played by its two leads, as well as by a good supporting cast, but is weakened in its latter stages by some contrived crime elements and a flashback structure that starts to work against the drama. That aside, it’s still a notable calling-card by first-time writer/director Shen Yu 申瑜, a Shanghaier in her early 40s who shows a sure hand for fragile teen emotions and a sharp eye for casting. After premiering at the Tokyo festival in late 2020, it opened in the Mainland this August, taking a polite RMB27 million.
The film has the fingerprints all over it of veteran Mainland indie producer Fang Li 方励, 68, whose festival-friendly company Laurel Films (Summer Palace 颐和园, 2006; Buddha Mountain 观音山, 2010; The Continent 后会无期, 2014, among many) produced and who, as well as taking a co-writing credit, also has a guest role as a rather creepy godfather, with Nai An 耐安 (a sometime producing partner in the same orbit, often for director Lou Ye 娄烨) playing his wife. Li Yu 李玉, a director who’s consistently worked with Fang, is co-creative producer 监制 with him on the film, and Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian, a regular with Lou & Co., composed the music. Shen, who came up through a 2016 training camp for young film directors organised by the China Film Directors’ Guild, co-wrote the script with Qiu Yujie 邱玉洁, a Beijing Film Academy graduate who co-wrote Lou’s The Shadow Play 风中有朵雨做的云 (2018) and made her directing debut with online horror movie The Skin 夺皮 (2020).
Inspired by a true event but with characters and almost everything else changed, the film starts in mediis rebus with a man and a woman meeting another man who, like them, has had his daughter kidnapped with a ransom demand of RMB2 million. It’s night, raining, everyone is close to hysterical – and the viewer is left largely in the dark as to who is who. Despite the woman’s objections, the three go to the police where, even before they get inside the building, several revelations take place. It’s an effective, if by no means original device, plunging the audience straight into the drama and, apart from a few minutes at the end, the rest of the film is one huge flashback leading up to that night. The viewer is introduced to the girls mentioned – Shui Qing and her senior-high classmate Ma Yueyue, as well as another classmate, drama queen Jin Xi – and their backstory is drip-fed via dialogue. When the lonely Shui Qing encounters the woman who abandoned her when still a baby, and forms a kind of mother-daughter relationship with her, it seems like a fresh start for the girl – until real life intervenes.
Apart from the central thread of the girl and her birth mother, the film is equally about the fragile, mercurial emotions of teenage girls – more with each other and family members than with boys. The film’s Chinese title means “Rabbit Violence” and director Shen is on record as saying it’s about how weak, cute-looking creatures can also become unexpectedly violent. (An earlier English title was Violence of the Weak, not ideal but better than the current meaningless one.) The film’s strongest section is its first half, as the audience gets to know Shui Qing, her mother Qu Ting, and both women’s universes; the crime thread that emerges in the second half, via Qu Ting’s background as a dancer in Shenzhen, quickly starts to stretch belief and looks like a contrived script device to inject some transformative drama into the character soup. The flashback structure starts to work against the drama nearer the end, as the viewer, who already has a rough idea of what is going to happen, becomes more distracted by how everything will fit in rather than by the emotional drama per se.
The film just about gets away with it all thanks to the two lead performances, with the under-rated Wan Qian 万茜, 39, so good as the wife in God of War 荡寇风云 (2017) and pathologist in Guilty of Mind 心理罪 (2017), holding it all together as the tough-skinned professional dancer who still has a few traces of maternal feelings, and Li Gengxi 李庚希, now 21, in her big-screen debut, beautifully underplaying the needy but resilient teenager. As her pal Ma Yueyue, newcomer Zhou Ziyue 周子越, 19, is somewhat blank in an underwritten role; showing more emotional fireworks is newcomer Chai Ye 柴烨, 22, as the girls’ show-offy pal. On the adult side, Huang Jue 黄觉 pops up as a deceptively kindly gangster, while Shi An 是安 and Pan Binlong 潘斌龙 don’t have a lot to work with as the girls’ fathers.
The film was shot in mid-2019 in the mining own of Panzhihua in the south of Sichuan province, with mountains, rivers and industrial clutter all effectively caught by d.p. Wang Shiqing 汪士卿 (kind-of-doc The Reunions 吉祥如意, 2020) without overdoing the realism. Yazdanian’s occasional score is typically atmospheric and chordal; editing by South Korea’s Ham Seong-weon 함성원 | 咸盛元 (the Bunshinsaba 笔仙 horror trilogy, 2012-14) is suitably invisible.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Laurel Films (CN).
Script: Shen Yu, Qiu Yujie, Fang Li. Photography: Wang Shiqing. Editing: Ham Seong-weon. Music: Peyman Yazdanian. Art direction: Zhang Jietao. Styling: Wang Tao. Sound: Ma Yi. Visual effects: A Donglin. Executive direction: Fang Zhen.
Cast: Wan Qian (Qu Ting), Li Gengxi (Shui Qing), Shi An (Shui Hao), Chai Ye (Jin Xi), Zhou Ziyue (Ma Yueyue), Yu Gengyin (Bai Haowen), Huang Jue (Du), Pan Binlong (Ma Yueyue’s father), Nai An (Ma Yueyue’s godmother), Fang Li (Ma Yueyue’s godfather), Yang Li (Wang Cuiping, Shui Qing’s step-mother), Gao Huayang (thin guy), Li Cai (Liu Binlong, policeman), Su Bo (Ding, female teacher), Tan Zixuan (Shui Qing’s younger half-brother).
Premiere: Tokyo Film Festival (Tokyo Premiere 2020), 1 Nov 2020.
Release: China, 14 Aug 2021.