Nina Wu

灼人秘密

Taiwan/Malaysia, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 103 mins.

Director: Zhao Deyin 赵德胤 [Midi Z].

Rating: 3/10.

Unsympathetic psychodrama centred on a neurotic, struggling actress tries to have it both ways.

STORY

Taibei, the present day. Wu Sufen (Wu Kexi) is a struggling, neurotic actress from central Taiwan, where she was in amateur theatre, who came to Taibei eight years ago and has been with her manager Ma Ke (Li Liren) for the past six. During that time, under the stage name Wu Ni’na, she has acted in shorts and commercials, as well as running her own webcam site. One day she’s asked to audition for the 1960s-set feature film 谍恋 (“A Spy in Love”) but she has reservations about the nudity in the script. Wearily, Ma Ke tells her it’s a much-sought-after role and she has to decide herself how much she wants it. After meeting the non-committal casting director (Xie Yingxuan), she auditions in front of a panel including the director (Shi Mingshuai) and producer (Tang Zhiwei). Despite the director not liking her, she gets the part. During shooting, he gives her a hard time to force an emotional performance from her. During the short break for Chinese New Year, she takes the train south to see her family; she also tries calling an old friend, Kiki (Song Yunhua), who is always on answerphone. Back in Taibei, filming resumes, with the director still cold towards her. But when he sees the finished film the producer declares he’s very happy and gives her the star treatment, with photo-spreads and interviews. But she is increasingly subject to anxiety attacks and hallucinations, especially at a luxury beauty clinic she attends. Receiving news that her mother is seriously ill after an operation, and that her father’s plastic-bag business has collapsed, she goes south to visit them. In the hospital she meets Kiki, who’s also heard the news. A primary school English teacher with no great ambitions, Kiki is still acting in the same amateur theatre, and Wu Sufen has heard a rumour that she is now together with an actor in the troupe. After sorting out an NT$180,000 debt that her father owes to a longtime employee (You Anshun), Wu Sufen has an emotional chat with Kiki, begging her to come to Taibei so they can be lovers once again. Next morning, Wu Sufen gets a call from Ma Ke that she’s urgently needed back in Taibei, as the film has been invited to a major festival.

REVIEW

After four dreary, documentary-like features in Myanmar, the land of his birth, Taiwan film-maker Zhao Deyin 赵德胤 [Midi Z], 37, tries for a leap into the mainstream – or at least, its artier extremities – with Nina Wu 灼人秘密, starring and co-written by Taiwan actress Wu Kexi 吴可熙, a regular in most of his previous films. Wu is more than ever front and centre here, in a psychodrama about a neurotic, struggling actress whose various demons start to overwhelm her when she gets the lead in her first feature. One of those films whose theme is how rotten the film industry is, but which also takes pleasure in graphically showing it, Nina Wu tries to have it both ways and then expects the viewer to feel compassion for its lead character, who knows exactly what she’s getting into.

A theatre as well as a film actress, Wu, 37, was the brightest thing in the three, grindingly slow films she made for Zhao (Poor Folk 穷人。榴莲。麻药。偷渡客, 2012; Ice Poison 冰毒, 2014; The Road to Mandalay 再见瓦城, 2016) and, at the other end of the emotional scale, as a sex’n’drugs-addled daughter, was one of a trio of actresses who almost rescued the eclectic crime drama The Bold the Corrupt and the Beautiful 血观音 (2017, dir. Yang Yazhe 杨雅喆). As co-writer and lead actress, however, she must bear part of the blame for Nina Wu, which can be read as either a serious, poison pen-letter to her own profession or a slice of artsy exploitation designed to get written about.

Whatever its intent, the finished result simply doesn’t work dramatically. Especially as played (but also as co-written) by Wu, the title character comes across as a cold artifact, a fatal mixture of ambition and pretension, who engenders no sympathy and even less understanding. Increasingly prey to demons, and with some kind of sexual block, she’s more a script construct than a character one can identify with. She’s also totally self-centred – no more so than in one of the film’s better scenes, where she tries to persuade her former lesbian lover to come back with her to Taibei now that she’s famous.

Wu plays the role in a particularly thankless, grim, one-note way that doesn’t let the viewer in: when her director gives her a hard time to extract a performance from her, the viewer ends up siding with him, not her – as well as thinking that she’s not actually a very good actress. This may be deliberate on Wu and Zhao’s part as there’s also a fair amount of sly comedy in the film, including the fact that the much-hyped film-within-the-film is actually a trashy period spy movie with awful dialogue (and later gets invited to “a major film festival”). As with Wu’s own role, Zhao deliberately obfuscates what, if anything, in the film is semi-autobiographical or just plain parody.

In a relatively small role as the lead’s onetime lesbian lover, Song Yunhua 宋芸桦 (Cafe. Waiting. Love 等  一个人  咖啡, 2014; Our Times 我的少女时代, 2015; Take Me to the Moon 带我去月球, 2017) brings some recognisable emotion into the film, and makes one want to see more of the 27-year-old actress, too often under-used in student roles. As an actress who confusingly (but perhaps deliberately) looks like an older version of Song, Xia Yuqiao 夏于乔, 36, makes effective use of her ability to play loopy parts (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? 明天记得爱上我, 2013; Zone Pro Site 总铺师, 2013). In other roles, Shi Mingshuai 施名帅 (the sympathetic police detective in The Scoundrels 狂徒, 2018) is convincing as the tough director, and Tang Zhiwei 汤志伟 as its smooth producer.

Editing by arthouse cutter Matthieu Laclau is okay. Widescreen photography by China-based German d.p. Florian Zinke 陆一帆 (Double Xposure 二次曝光, 2012; Baby 宝贝儿, 2018) is wild and saturated in the over-cooked fantasies but subtler elsewhere.
The film’s Chinese title means “Scorching Secret”.

CREDITS

Presented by Seashore Image Productions (TW), Harvest 9 Road Entertainment (TW), Jazzy Pictures (MY). Produced by Seashore Image Productions (TW).

Script: Wu Kexi, Zhao Deyin [Midi Z]. Photography: Florian Zinke. Editing: Matthieu Laclau, Cai Yanshan. Music: Lin Qiang [Lim Giong]. Art direction: Guo Zhida. Styling: Zhong Chuting, Chen Zhuoming. Sound: Li Danfeng, Zhou Zhen, Yan Weizhen. Action: Hong Shihao. Visual effects: Lin Zongmin.

Cast: Wu Kexi (Wu Sufen/Wu Ni’na/Nina Wu), Song Yunhua (Kiki), Xia Yuqiao (Girl No. 3), Shi Mingshuai (director), Tang Zhiwei (producer), Li Liren (Ma Ke/Mark), Xie Yingxuan (casting director), Zheng Renshuo (Nina Wu’s assistant), Huang Shanghe (assistant director), Lv Yang (producer’s assistant), Zheng Pingjun (Nina Wu’s father), Wang Yue (Nina Wu’s aunt), Wang Juan (Nina Wu’s mother), Song Shaoqing (Nina Wu’s uncle), You Anshun (Wang, father’s employee), Zhang Li’ang (young film actor).

Premiere: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), 20 May 2019.

Release: Taiwan, 19 Jul 2019; Malaysia, 31 Oct 2019.