InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 9

FILM REVIEWS
easy to posit a hackneyed thesis like "Zhang is saying 'x' about
inter-Asian social dynamics," but his work operates on a more
nuanced register than that, one concerned with the way complex
intercultural dynamics subtly influence the already knotted web
of interpersonal relationships. Characters are universally
allegorical rather than avatars of nations or class. The dual
settings of Beijing and Yanagawa are triangulated with
occasional reference to the distant, unseen apex of London.
Consider how Zhang’s 2005 feature debut, Tang Poetry,
contrasted a direct, imagistic, raw depiction of emptiness and
domestic violence with the elliptical textual density of the
medium that film took as its titular subject.
In Yanagawa, the audience finds themselves at the other
extremity of the relational spectrum: complete unity. Every
image is steeped in text; there is no shot that does not center a
character, just as there is no text that is semiotically distinct
within a composition. Every image in the film is in an unusual
aesthetic harmony with the moment that meets it. The editorial
grammar is understated and appropriately punctuated. The
cinematography is subtly obfuscatory and tightly bound by rules,
as is the meandering but dramatically austere story. We see
people using their phones but never what is on them. Characters
act with a deliberateness so overwrought as to be
indistinguishable from reckless impulse. Despite a cultivated
artifice of "realism," the dialogue is often bizarre and
non-naturalistic, each line a functional hook in a continuity of
poetic logic. For example: in the opening sequence, central
character Dong (Zhang Liuyi) tells a complete stranger that he
has been diagnosed with stage-four cancer in a bizarre and
unempathetic exchange, but for the rest of the film, he obscures
this fact from the people he loves most, to his own detriment.
Each textual construct in Yanagawa functions this way, as irony,
or as contrast, or as disconnect, compounding loops of meaning
within loops of feeling. Cumulatively the effect is novelistic in the
best way possible, building a metatextual schema in the viewer’s
mind as the film progresses, a nebula of intrigue and implication
demanding analysis from its audience. Zhang is like an ambient
narrativist, reveling in minute textural shifts in feeling and affect,
and maintaining intrigue and a subtle aesthetic build across
duration. On a more tangible level, Yanagawa's mournful longing
is relatable to anyone who has experienced the sad misdirects of
love, without seeking to reflect common experiences back at its
audience. — NOEL OAKSHOT
DIRECTOR: Zhang Lu; CAST: Ni Ni, Zhang Liuyi, Xin Baiqing;
DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; STREAMING: February 24;
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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