Mei Li
美丽
China/Taiwan, 2018, colour, 1.85:1, 88 mins.
Director: Zhou Zhou 周洲.
Rating: 6/10.
Lead actress Chi Yun elevates a fairly conventional indie about a young woman’s downward spiral.
STORY
Changchun city, Jilin province, northeast China, the present day, late spring. Meili (Chi Yun), a woman in her 20s, works in a small laundry; her lover, Li Wen (Zhou Meiyan), works for a larger company where she often has to spend evenings entertaining clients. Li Wen is due to spend a couple of months on secondment in Shanghai and Meili is unsure whether to accompany her. Meili then gets a call from her elder sister (Li Shuangyu) demanding RMB1,000 for tuition fees for the latter’s young daughter Na’na, whom Meili gave surrogate birth to due to her sister’s infertility. Visiting her sister’s flat, Meili has a violent argument with her brother-in-law (Wang Limin), which ends with her attacking Na’na. She then hears she’s been laid off work at the laundry beacause of declining business. Next, Li Wen says it would be better if she went to Shanghai on her own, as she’s afraid of gossip among her workmates. Lonely and depressed, Meili joins a female friend, Wu Dan (Li Xianjing), at karaoke, where she’s introduced to Xiaoyu (Yuan Xiaoyu). Next day, Xiaoyu says he can get Meili a job at the mobile-phone shop where he works as a salesman. A month later, Meili patches things up by phone with Li Wen. But then her sister demands more money, claiming she’s been beaten up by her husband and is now homeless and jobless. Meili grudgingly gives her some money, but things only continue to get worse on all fronts.
REVIEW
A magnetic performance by Mainland actress Chi Yun 池韵 elevates Mei Li 美丽, an otherwise fairly conventional indie centred on a young woman’s bleak life as she’s beset with problems in love, work and family. Set and shot in Changchun, northeast China, this first feature by Anhui-born writer-director Zhou Zhou 周洲, who previously worked for CCTV’s movie channel, sticks in the memory despite its adherence to indie “realist” conventions and a screenplay that’s very manipulative. There’s enough here to make one look out for Zhou’s next move, when it may become clearer whether he was just lucky with casting this time round.
The film marks the biggest role yet for Changchun-born Chi, 28, who made an engaging debut as the lead’s best friend in the remarkable first-crush movie My Heart Leaps Up 我心雀跃 (2016), and followed that with bigger parts in two online horrors, the offbeat psychodrama Hell Memory 格式化少女 (2016) – as an amnesiac, possibly homicidal teenager – and Evil Intentions 养诡 (2017). In Mei Li she literally carries the whole film, with the camera concentrating on her in every shot – a demand that Chi meets with a performance that encompasses a wide range of moods without ever seeming theatrical, self-pitying or unsympathetic.
The weakness is the screenplay (co-credited to Chi) which, despite the film’s “realistic” look and tone, is highly managed to support the sole thesis of the main character’s downward spiral. (The ending, in particular, seems to be just a way of ending the film rather than a natural climax.) No big deal is made of her lesbianism – including a love sequence in bath and bed that comes across as entirely normal – but the catalogue of disasters in her life soon becomes very predictable, robbing the film of any real drama or tension. By the time the lead’s lover proposes co-investing in some company shares, you can already guess things are likely to end badly.
Despite the fact that supporting characters are basically script conveniences, performances are fine within those limitations. As the self-centred, unreliable lover, Zhou Meiyan 周美妍 is entirely convincing through small details; as the (straight) best friend, Li Xianjing 李贤静 contributes some of the best moments in a minimalistic way, especially the pair’s touching farewell on a park bench.
The naturalistic, hand-held camerawork of d.p. Zhu Enli 朱恩立 – who shot the visually flashier Hell Memory – captures springtime Changchun in an everyday way, as a rather dull northern city that everyone wants to escape for the lure of the more glamorous Shanghai down south. Editing is trim, with no arty lingering for its own sake; apart from a string quartet over the end titles, there’s no music, nor is it missed.
The Chinese title is both the lead’s given name and (ironically) the word for “beautiful”. For some reason, the film is being sold abroad as Ms. Meili, though the title on the actual movie is just Mei Li (two words).
CREDITS
Presented by Atom Cinema (TW). Produced by Sea Original Film (CN).
Script: Zhou Zhou, Chi Yun. Photography: Zhu Enli. Editing: Zhou Zhou, Huang Bojun. Music: uncredited. Art direction: uncredited. Sound: Wang Changrui.
Cast: Chi Yun (Meili), Zhou Meiyan (Li Wen), Li Xianjing (Wu Dan), Wang Limin (Meili’s brother-in-law), Li Shuangyu (Meili’s elder sister), Yuan Xiaoyu (Xiaoyu).
Premiere: First Film Festival (Competition), Xining, China, 23 Jul 2018.
Release: China, tba; Taiwan, tba.