The Old Town Girls Review: Shen Yu’s Indecisive Portrait of a Left Behind Generation

The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be.

The Old Town Girls
Photo: Cheng Cheng Films

A byproduct of mainland China’s volatile economic development over the last quarter-century has been a rise in migration out of the equivalent of Rust Belt areas of the country, where livable wages are scarce and waning industries impede the progress seen elsewhere in China. That’s resulted in a “left behind” generation of children who are raised by grandparents or family friends and who have internalized feelings of unwantedness.

When we first meet high school senior Shuiqing (Li Gengxi), the main protagonist of director Shen Yu’s The Old Town Girls, she’s being turned away at the door by her mother-in-law and younger half-brother, informed that her grandparents are visiting and “just want to have a family dinner.” Shuiqing’s father is remarried, and seems to work constantly. Her mother, we’re told, is out of the picture—until she suddenly shows up in a bright yellow dress and sports car, trailed by debtors with mafia connections, to turn Shuiqing’s life upside down.

The film’s narrative scope extends to the stories of two other teens, characters that allow Shen and co-writers Qiu Yujie and Fang Li to build out their study of the cultural forces that impact the development of young people, specifically girls, in modern China. Shuiqing’s best friend, Jin Xi (Ye Chai), comes from a wealthy family but similarly is estranged from her largely absent parents, resorting to self-harm and concocting fake kidnapping schemes as desperate cries for attention. Meanwhile, Yueyue (Zhou Ziyue), Shuiqing and Jin Xi’s classmate, is being looked after by her doting single father, Old Ma (Pan Binlong), whose poor mental health and economic standing become reason enough for his boss at the local factory to offer to adopt Yueyue.

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All three girls’ lives reach an inflection point with the introduction of Shuiqing’s mother, Qu Ting (Wan Qian), a freewheeling woman unlike any other in their orbit. She radiates independence and mystery, but also danger. During one lovely, if cliché, passage in The Old Town Girls, Qu Ting takes the girls out for a night on the town, for a moment liberating them and herself from the complicated concerns of burgeoning adulthood. But it’s a fleeting moment of bliss, as the arrival of violent men from Qu Ting’s past upends all of their lives.

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Shen, following a well-established trend in recent Chinese arthouse cinema, pulled The Old Town Girls’s pulpier narrative elements straight from the headlines. At the outset of the film, we see what initially appears to be a double-kidnapping plot unravel, as Qu Ting, Shuiqing’s father (Shi An), and Old Ma all debate whether or not to get the police involved, with Qu Ting in particular protesting against this, fearing retaliation from the kidnappers. The scene progresses long enough to show the unexpected resolution of this incident, before flashing back to a few days prior—a decision that badly deflates the film’s ability to build much suspense throughout. Instead, Shen tends to rely on the energy generated by her aesthetic, which seems very much indebted to her countryman Lou Ye’s style (Qiu also co-wrote Lou’s The Shadow Play).

Shen tends to want to find as many angles as possible from which to shoot a scene, and take in her characters’ surroundings, so as to give us an impression of modern China’s urban spaces and what it feels like to move through them. But she finds mixed success in marrying her attempts at acute social commentary to the plot mechanics of a genre film, and struggles further under the weight imposed on her by censors to make her film into a strident anti-crime message-movie—as enforced at the end by the customary title card that informs us not only how severely punished everyone involved was but also urges vigilance from the citizenry.

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The Old Town Girls might have overcome at least some of these problems if Shen had been able to more clearly communicate her perspective on this story. The film’s Chinese title is a little more instructive, translating roughly to “rabbits attack” and likely referring to a Chinese saying about the fight-or-flight impulse of animals of prey. Unfortunately, that more empathetic reading of The Old Town Girls gets lost in translation due to the plot’s convoluted twists and turns, which muddle how we’re supposed to feel about Qu Ting. She’s a woman who, on the one hand, seems to present a more feminist and independent model for the younger girls in the film but whose bad life choices (including her decision to leave her daughter behind) turn her into a tragic figure at best, and an example of what happens when you lead a selfish life at worst.

That implicit moralizing blunts The Old Town Girls effectiveness as social commentary, while its noir-ish atmosphere and brief, bookending scenes of suspense aren’t enough to make it satisfying as a genre film. Shen has more skill as a stylist than many Chinese filmmakers who’ve attempted this kind of based-on-true-events arthouse thriller, but ultimately The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.

Score: 
 Cast: Wan Qian, Li Gengxi, Shi An, Chai Ye, Zhou Ziyue, Yu Gengyin, Huang Jue, Pan Binlong  Director: Shen Yu  Screenwriter: Qiu Yujie, Shen Yu  Distributor: Cheng Cheng Films  Running Time: 128 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Sam C. Mac

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

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