The Crossing
过春天
China, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 98 mins.
Director: Bai Xue 白雪.
Rating: 7/10.
A notable coming-of-age story, framed as a smuggling drama set between Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
STORY
Shenzhen city, Guangdong province, China, autumn 2014. Liu Zipei (Huang Yao), 16, lives with her good-time Mainland mother Lan (Ni Hongjie) in Shenzhen but crosses the border by train every day to go to high school in Hong Kong. Her closest friend is fun-loving classmate Jo (Tang Jiawen), from a well-off Hong Kong family, with whom she’s planning to take a luxury trip to Japan over Christmas. The two girls make pocket money by selling things like mobile-phone screen guards (made in the Mainland) to their Hong Kong classmates, and now she is 16 Liu Zipei also starts working part time at a Hong Kong restaurant. Whenever she gets the chance, she visits her Hong Kong biological father Yong (Liao Qizhi), a onetime cross-border lorry driver who now works and lives in a container yard, and who dotes over her. Her relations with her mother, who gave birth to Liu Zipei in Hong Kong to get her citizenship, are far cooler. One day Liu Zipei and Jo skip school to go to a yacht party attended by Jo’s boyfriend Hao (Sun Yang), 20, at which Jo gets hopelessly drunk. Hao works in his family’s street-food restaurant but also moonlights for a gang smuggling goods across the border into the Mainland, and Liu Zipei agrees, for a fee, to take four smartphones for him. Attracted by the cash and the thrill, Liu Zipei asks to do more jobs for him, without telling Jo. Hao introduces her to the gang, led by a Hong Kong woman, Hua (Jiang Meiyi), and Liu Zipei gets to like her new circle. But one delivery to the gang’s Mainland contact, Shui (Jiao Gang), goes wrong and Hao has to rescue the situation. Gradually Liu Zipei becomes close to Hao, and Hao starts seeing less of Jo. And then Liu Zipei is asked to help smuggle across a major consignment of the new iPhone6.
REVIEW
A coming-of-age film, framed as a teenage girl’s flirtation with a Hong Kong gang smuggling luxury goods across the Chinese border into Shenzhen, The Crossing 过春天 is an impressive first feature by Mainland writer-director Bai Xue 白雪 following a couple of her female-centred shorts (The Fat Girl 卡门, 2007; Home 谁回谁家, 2012). Co-written by Taiwan’s Lin Meiru 林美如 (a Beijing Film Academy graduate), creatively produced by Mainland veteran Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮壮, and featuring a remarkable performance by young Central Academy of Drama graduate Huang Yao 黄尧, the film has a kinetic energy from its realistic, handheld style and tight editing but also a slightly dreamy quality that reflects the main character’s emotional confusion as a teenager.
The film’s English title – as well as the Chinese one (literally, “Crossing Spring”) – sums up its many parallel themes. Born in Hong Kong to a local father and Mainland mother, Liu Zipei (Huang) is just 16 when the movie opens, not only on the cusp of womanhood but also still making the daily journey to school across the border between two different societies. Fully at home in neither, she speaks Cantonese during the day and Mandarin when she returns home to Shenzhen; she’s closer to her father, a onetime cross-border lorry driver whom she visits occasionally in Hong Kong, than to her mother, who parties with an endless succession of men; her best friend is a classmate from a well-off Hong Kong family, while she makes pocket money re-selling cheaper Mainland items at school. Largely friendless, with no clear roots in either society, she sees the opportunity to engage in serious smuggling of luxury goods as a way to assert her independence as she also crosses from childhood to adulthood.
It’s an original spin on the familiar genre of high-school youth movies, with a Hong Kong grittiness informing the whole coming-of-age genre. Money seems to be the only thing Liu Zipei can trust, as well as giving her the key to independence, given her lack of any real family life. Though her decision to secretly become an iPhone “mule” for her BFF’s boyfriend involves a personal betrayal, it’s a risk she’s prepared to take – attracted as much by the thrill and by the desire to find a new “family” (of young smugglers) as by the money earned.
To its credit, the screenplay by Bai and Lin never gives explicit voice to all these parallel themes, focusing simply on the plot as Liu Zipei gets drawn deeper and deeper into her illegal moonlighting. The handheld, widescreen photography by Beijing-based commercials d.p. Piao Songri 朴松日, 37, keeps the atmosphere stoked as well as centred on the main protagonist’s world, often (as in the multiple border crossings) using shallow depth-of-field, occasionally punctuated by dramatic freeze-frames (plus sound effects) as she goes through yet another crucial moment in her journey. One sequence between her and her BFF’s boyfriend, which explicitly taps into the film’s sexual undercurrents as the pair strap phones to their bodies, owes as much to Piao’s lighting and camerawork as it does to the actors’ playing. Editing by France’s Matthieu Laclau (A Touch of Sin 天注定, 2013; Love Education 相爱相亲, 2017; Ash Is Purest White 江湖儿女, 2018), plus Taiwan’s Lin Shuyu 林书宇 [Tom Lin] and Cai Yanshan 蔡晏珊, also keeps things mobile without being visually distracting.
In her first leading role, Guangdong-born Huang (Red Army drama Triumphantly Join Forces 大会师, 2016), though playing eight years younger than her real age, is utterly convincing in her character’s many moods without becoming either unsympathetic or self-pitying. Hong Kong’s Sun Yang 孙阳, 29, and Tang Jiawen 汤加文 (horror Buyer Beware 吉屋, 2018) are both fine as the young smuggler and the BFF, though it’s their stalwart compatriot Jiang Meiyi 江美仪, 47, who leaves the strongest impression as the gang’s tough boss lady. Fellow character veteran Liao Qizhi 廖启智 [Liu Kai-chi] is briefly memorable as the girl’s kindly father.
CREDITS
Presented by Wanda Media (CN).
Script: Bai Xue, Lin Meiru. Photography: Piao Songri. Editing: Matthieu Laclau, Lin Shuyu [Tom Lin], Cai Yanshan. Music: Gao Xiaoyang, Li Bin. Art direction: Zhang Zhaokang. Styling: Zhang Zhaokang. Sound: Feng Yanming, Lin Xuelin.
Cast: Huang Yao (Liu Zipei), Sun Yang (Hao), Tang Jiawen (Jo), Ni Hongjie (Lan, Liu Zipei’s mother), Liao Qizhi [Liu Kai-chi] (Yong, Liu Zipei’s father), Jiang Meiyi (Hua), Jiao Gang (Shui).
Premiere: Toronto Film Festival (Discovery), 7 Sep 2018.
Release: China, 15 Mar 2019.