Walking past the future [路過未來]

Released: 2017             Viewed: March 2019

 

As the film begins, Yang Yaoting [Yang Zishan] and her family live and work in southern Shenzhen. However, her father’s ill-health leads to his dismissal and when her mother also loses her job, the family decide to move back to their native Gansu in northern China. Of course, when they get there, their old house is in bad condition and the land they left 25 years earlier has long since been transferred into the hands of a local entrepreneur. The visit home leads to culture shock on both sides and the family are ill-suited to agricultural work due to lack of experience and poor physical condition.

Nonetheless, the parents decide to stay in Gansu given the lower living costs but Yaoting returns to her high-tech assembly job in Shenzhen. Here she is obsessed with earning enough money to buy her parents an apartment (for reasons we only fully discover later). But with apartment prices increasing constantly, this is not easy and leads to Yaoting becoming involved in potentially dangerous medical tests to earn more money. In contrast, her work colleague Li Qian [Wang Ting] uses the money to pay for her plastic surgery.

Yaoting seems to have met an anonymous soul-mate on -line but she does not know that this is only one of the personae of the morally ambiguous Xinmin [Yin Fang] whose activities include recruiting participants (including Yaoting) in the medical experiments.

The opening two-thirds of the film provide a convincing picture of the challenges faced by many people working in and living in China with high levels of risk, low levels of employee and consumer protection, poor health services and rampant consumerism. (There is a striking difference between the generally positive academic portrayal of China’s health care system and its almost invariably negative portrayal on film).

Despite the problems of urban life, the film does not suggest any nostalgia for the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and shows why rural-urban migration is driven both by supply and demand. It also makes a point about the extent to which people’s social lives have moved on-line. The direction of cause and effect between the poverty of interpersonal relationships and the preference for anonymous on-line communication is left unclear.

There are a number of striking images including the contrast between the shining factory work environment and the dismal conditions of the women’s dormitory; and a scene where a rural parent comes to claim the body of his daughter (who died during an operation) and does not recognise her due to extensive plastic surgery.

However, the final 30 minutes shifts gear into melodrama and becomes a struggle between Yaoting and an anonymous fate (rather than more tangible oppressors).  A second weakness is that the characters are rather two dimensional. Yaoting herself is generally too good and self-sacrificing to be true. Qian, in contrast, is a typical modern girl, interested only in consumer goods (although any interest in sex is airbrushed out). The parents are hapless victims of a changing society. But Yang Zishan [So Young, Miss Granny] is – as usual – very effective in the role of Yaoting (especially given how little she has to work with).

Worth watching despite its failure to deliver its full potential.