Families are not only a bond of blood, but also a web of broken expectations, unfulfilled dreams, and unhealed wounds.
( Maggie O'Farrell)
We are all creatures shaped by the context that welcomed us – or rejected us. But in Hoby Zhang, there is more than just a sociological observation: there is the painful and uninterrupted investigation of a torn interiority, which looks at itself as an unresolved question. Unlike many of his peers, Zhang does not point the finger outward, but plunges into the dark well of the subject, allowing pain to emerge as a form of knowledge. It is from this abyss that Xili, the young protagonist of the film, is born: a silent and seemingly meek presence, yet with a gaze full of enigmas. Her appearance is already framed from the very first shots as an enigma: she silently follows a school friend who enters a car too familiar – a scene that quietly opens the door to the unsaid.
The film’s structure is intentionally fragmented, discontinuous, reflecting the disordered nature of memory and guilt. Xili, determined to help her boyfriend – a divorced director with a young daughter – finance his film, conceives a plan that is both an act of manipulation and a form of desperate redemption. She blackmails the friend, the secret lover of her father, triggering a chain of events that will bring her into direct conflict with her mother. Yet, her motivations remain elusive: is it the blind drive of someone who has lost their center, or a deliberate, almost sacrificial act to restore order to the original chaos of her existence?
Her father's face – always elusive, never truly present – becomes the symbol of original absence, of the lack that marks the young girl's entire existence. Xili grew up in a family that denied her being: placed in foster care as a child, then returned to a family that never truly recognized her as part of itself. Born only out of her father's desire, but never authentically loved, she remains imprisoned in an orphanhood that no relationship can ever fill. The mother is an opaque figure, a silent enemy, and the father, though her presumed ally, remains distant, intangible. Xili's desire for love thus materializes in a repeated failure: she seeks, in vain, from others – from the friend, the boyfriend, and from art – the sense she was never able to receive from those who should have given it to her first.
The film’s title evokes À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the second volume of Proust’s Recherche, but in this Eastern variation, there is no nostalgia for the lost time, but rather the realization that what has been lost can no longer be repaired. The past is not a territory that can be revisited: it is a wound that pulses in the present and continues to shape the future.
The viewer is deliberately destabilized: the visual beauty of Wu Jianfeng’s cinematography – lush, almost painterly – is contrasted with sudden narrative shifts, twists that do not obey the logic of suspense, but rather the more subtle and uneasy logic of trauma. Xili lives in the double depth of consciousness: for her, betrayal, lies, and manipulation are the natural language of survival. But every gesture brings her inexorably closer to the void. There is no catharsis, nor liberation: only the accumulation of a sense of guilt that becomes the very substance of her identity.
The episodic structure of the film – divided into chapters, like a musical score – follows the broken trajectories of the soul. The music accompanying the images, The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, becomes a metaphor for an order that Xili can only contemplate, but never inhabit. The choice of this collection – preludes and fugues in all keys, composed "for the use of the musical youth eager to learn" – amplifies the contrast between the rigor of art and the disorder of life. In that fugue, Xili finds neither harmony nor resolution: her existence is entirely contained in the movement between notes, in the futile attempt to temper an original dissonance.
The blackmail orchestrated by Xili transforms into an act of defiance against a world that has failed to love her, a paradoxical attempt at redemption through guilt. But it is an act destined to fail because what was denied in childhood – love, care, recognition – cannot be compensated. Zhang’s work does not offer redemption, but a passage: perhaps only a new cycle, another time, can open a crack towards an existence that is more than mere survival.
In the meantime, the music continues. The fugue remains open, the prelude does not end. Bach and Proust, both masters of time and memory, observe from afar this small human drama unfolding in the space between what has been and what can never be.
Family is the place where we learn to live with our scars, even when no one sees them.
(Clarice Lispector)
22° Asian Film Festival
