Perfect Life

Wanmei Shenghuo

(China, Hong Kong, 2008, 97 mins)

HDCam

North American Premiere

Selected Filmography:  

PRODS: Chow Keung, Jia Zhangke, Li Xiudong
SCR: Emily Tang
CAM: Lai Yiu-Fai
ED: Chow Keung
Cast: Yao Qianyu, Cheng Taisheng, Jenny Tse, Cheng Huanzhi, Yu Zhilong, Wu Yanjie

Dragons & Tigers Award Nominee.

We’re in Northeast China (the former Manchuria) and Li Yueying is a repressed 21-year-old from a broken home. Her father walked out for another woman, and her mother forced her to give up higher education so that they’d have enough money to send her kid brother Jin to technical college. Yueying quits her job in a small workshop making artificial limbs and becomes a hotel maid, but lives mostly in her own fantasy world; she sometimes tells people her father is dead. Then she catches the eye of Wang Honglin, a charismatic Mongolian who often stays in the hotel and persists in trying to invite her out despite repeated brush-offs. It turns out, though, that Wang is a criminal with big troubles of his own...

Emily Tang’s quietly masterly film spans five crucial years in Li Yueying’s life: she ends up in China’s southern boom-town Shenzhen, in a very different situation from anything we might expect. Tang mysteriously cross-cuts between Li’s story and that of a divorced mother-of-two, also from China but living in Hong Kong and fighting for alimony from her ex-husband. These two women meet only once, very briefly, but have more in common than first appears. Across these two counterpointed lives, the deeply felt film constructs a panorama of desires (both admitted and denied) and hopes (both realized and dashed). Like co-producer Jia Zhangke’s films, it’s acutely sensitive to the impact of China’s social and economic changes on individual lives.

VIFF acknowledges the support of the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office in Canada in presenting the films from Hong Kong

-- Tony Rayns

Sponsored By:

Chinese Canadian Times

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