Stonewalling
Photo: Yellow-Green Pi

Stonewalling Review: Once Upon a Time in Post-Tik Tok China

Huang Ji and Otsuka Ryûji’s Stonewalling is a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.

Mainland Chinese director Huang Ji and her Japanese cinematographer husband (and sometimes co-director), Otsuka Ryûji, uphold a tradition foundational to Chinese independent cinema since at least the 1990s: mapping the social, cultural, and economic consequences of the modernization that China underwent following its opening-up and reform period. More specifically, though, and due in no small part to a sexual assault that Huang experienced as a youth in rural Hunan, her work is part of a fomenting movement in Chinese independent cinema to address fundamental misunderstandings about women in the society, and especially as it concerns the way that young women in China perceive their bodies.

The third film in a loose trilogy, Stonewalling follows 2012’s partly autobiographical Egg and Stone, an acutely observed and formally sophisticated portrait of a 14-year-old girl’s sexual awakening, and 2017’s The Foolish Bird, a more narratively complex and emotionally scattered attempt to graft genre elements onto a story of a high school girl’s encounters with boys and men of different ages. In Stonewalling, Huang and Otsuka’s recurring but unrelated protagonist, Lynn (played in all three films by Yao Hong-gui), is a college-aged woman who’s studying to be a flight attendant until an unexpected pregnancy (another constant of this trilogy) routes her back to her parents’ care. Like Foolish Bird before it, a lot of narrative and thematic ground is covered in Stonewalling, but the film strikes a much better balance between social commentary and the intense focus placed on the inner life of this young woman.

When conducting casting for Egg and Stone in her hometown, Huang discovered Yao, a non-actor, and has continued to cast her ever since. As a result, the two have forged a relationship that speaks to a sense of universality (the protagonists in each of Huang and Otsuka’s films are faced with a unique set of circumstances) while also drilling down on an individual experience, thanks to Yao’s continued presence. The actress’s performance is particularly strong in Stonewalling, because instead of being called on to more or less intimate the emotional and physical changes required of a “coming-of-age” narrative, as she was in the other two films of this trilogy, here she has to pull off something akin to the reverse of that.

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This Lynn starts out as a woman with some ostensible agency, setting out on the path that modernization—or, less euphemistically, capitalism—has laid out for her. In the first scene of the film, Lynn and her boyfriend (Liu Long) attend a posh party where mostly English is spoken and conversations revolve around settled plans or aspirations to leave China. “Are there other countries you want to go to?” asks an English teacher at the party, to which Lynn replies, with a modestly uncomfortable chuckle, “No particular place in mind.”

It’s clear from the emotionally distant interactions between them that Lynn isn’t as invested in her path as her boyfriend is in his careerist ambitions (we see him at various social functions glad-handing every besuited man in sight). But Lynn is at least seemingly committed to seeing through her education, right up until the cumulative impact of two related distractions finally divert her from that course: the freelance modeling work she’s taken on (as we learn later, to pay off her mother’s debt), and, more urgently, the cause of a persistent pain in her breasts.

When a work acquaintance sets Lynn up with a shady egg donor service, another means to make some quick money to send back home, a required physical reveals the early stages of a pregnancy, which spurs a conversation that Lynn’s boyfriend seems disinclined to have. In a scene between the couple that demonstrates Huang and Otsuka’s typically sharp compositional sense, Lynn is seated on the bed looking away from us, on one side of the frame, while her boyfriend is slumped into an armchair on the other, facing away from Lynn—an articulation of not only the couples’ disconnect but also of the distance purposefully being placed between us and our understanding of Lynn’s real feelings, at least by this point.

Subsequently, Lynn decides to move back in with her parents (played by Huang’s real mother and father) and carry her baby to term, and the film places emphasis on a new cultural and physical landscape. Where the first half-hour of the film is filled with pristine hotel rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on high-rises, and the handsomely appointed office spaces of a metropolitan Changsha (Hunan’s capital, and one of the fastest growing cities in China), suddenly we’re thrust into a suburban, cramped family apartment and a small pharmacy-cum-clinic that Lynn’s mother owns, both located somewhere outside the city. However, the filmmakers ambitions here aren’t to present the more culturally “Chinese” world of Lynn’s life back with her family as dichotomous to the one that she was living in a “Westernized” cityscape.

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The differences between these spaces seem to be less the point than is the perspective that’s afforded to Lynn when she starts moving back and forth between them. While taking a break from her college courses (and avoiding a boyfriend to whom at this point she’s lied to about having an abortion), a pregnant Lynn seeks out work for the egg donor service that she herself had tried to use earlier—where she’s tasked with ferrying young women, including Uyghur migrants whom she’s instructed to keep a special eye on, to private appointments in rented-out hotel suites with men who interview them aggressively about their physical and mental health.

Stonewalling
Yao Hong-gui and Liu Long in a scene from Stonewalling. © Yellow-Green Pi

Meanwhile, back in Changsha, Lynn engages in tense dialogues with a local businessman to whom she’s promised her unborn child—an arrangement she’s decided on in order to finally pay off her mother’s mounting debt. What quickly becomes clear is that the adult life that Lynn was living at the beginning of Stonewalling only afforded her an illusion of agency—one ultimately dictated by the power structures of an accelerated market economy that’s permeated all levels of the society, and that dictates that so much of social interaction be determined by class roles.

Huang herself has observed that women “need the physical lived experiences of their bodies to grow their understanding of themselves.” Lynn is a representation of what happens to women who aren’t afforded that chance—who aren’t equipped to break out of the passive roles they take on in their own lives, and who specifically aren’t equipped by Chinese society to process their sexual maturation. It’s a frustrating character to structure a film around, but Yao succeeds in locating small moments that articulate a gradual realization of the societal trap in which Lynn’s found herself and her body. And by the end of the film, Huang and Otsuka have built out a compelling narrative that takes pains to grasp the full breadth of social and psychological conditioning that leads to young women having such little command over their own fates.

Stonewalling was born from an admixture of autobiographical reference points from Huang’s own life (her parents also ran a clinic and the film was shot in their actual apartment) and stories taken from a robust number of interviews conducted with college-aged women. Those interviews apparently tackled a whole range of issues, from the gig economy that supports college students’ spending habits while they attend full-time classes to the numbing effects of social media and, specifically, multi-level marketing schemes conducted on platforms like TikTok (a subplot that finds its way into Stonewalling through Lynn’s mother’s investment in promoting a sham Vitality Cream product). As a result, there are some underdeveloped ideas and plot digressions here—one big one being a late-film introduction of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a lack of interest in exploring how that crisis fits into the broader thematic picture.

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At 147 minutes, Stonewalling is also Huang and Otsuka’s longest film to date, but it rarely suffers from Foolish Bird’s over-complicated plotting, instead largely keeping its runtime focused on developing a robust sense of the social and cultural landscapes whose unique characteristics shape both our own understanding of Lynn and of the forces that stifle her capacity to understand herself. Likewise, Otsuka’s cinematography is some of his best to date (ranking with his work on Ying Liang’s films), consistently capturing striking compositions that key us into the psychological space of an intentionally opaque heroine.

Stonewalling is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid (for China) women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications. In a sense, Chinese authorities’ apprehensiveness toward Huang and Otsuka—they literally pulled the plug on Egg and Stone’s Beijing premiere in the middle of the screening, so scared were they of its taboo subject—has been vindicated, since few filmmakers today are pushing so effectively to reexamine authority and question autonomy in the People’s Republic.

Score: 
 Cast: Yao Hong-gui, Liu Long, Xiao Zilong, Huang Xiaoxiong, Liu Gang  Director: Huang Ji, Otsuka Ryûji  Screenwriter: Huang Ji, Otsuka Ryûji  Distributor: KimStim  Running Time: 147 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Sam C. Mac

Sam C. Mac is the former editor in chief of In Review Online.

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