Stonewalling (Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, 2022) (Patreon)

Here are the basic deets, per my Viennale catalogue entry:

"In their second collaboration, Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji offer a complex, heartrending portrait of a young Chinese woman searching for love and identity in a time when everything can and will be bought and sold. Lynn (Honggui Yao) is a 20-year-old college student. But she is caught between her boyfriend Zhang (Long Liu) and her parents (Xiaoxiong Huang and Zilong Xiao), all of whom have diverging plans for her. Zhang insists that Lynn take English classes to improve her marketability.

But Lynn’s mother, a doctor at a women’s clinic, wants to take advantage of her daughter’s unwanted pregnancy to get her out of jam, as she is being extorted by a mob boss (Ciu Chi) who blames her for his cousin’s stillbirth. As we follow Lynn through the nine months of her pregnancy, we see her try to pick up odd jobs, mostly pertaining to the commodification of her youth and beauty. Whether it’s trying to sell ova to wealthy women looking to conceive, or fulfilling her ambition of becoming a flight attendant (“a pretty girl’s job,” one man remarks), Lynn’s primary currency is her body. And when Covid-19 breaks out, the price of life shifts even more dramatically, becoming a true buyers’ market."

There's obviously quite a lot going on in Stonewalling, but it's perhaps worth noting one thing right off the bat. Current geopolitical reality casts Stonewalling in an unusual light, since Chinese art cinema has been almost entirely squashed under Xi Jinping. The industry has clamped down hard on independent productions, and this film would not exist were it not for Otsuka's Japanese citizenship and resources. (Even though Stonewalling is quite clearly a Chinese film, it is officially a Japanese production.) So even though certain themes are quite clear in this film -- particularly the encroachment of brutal market logic into every aspect of Chinese life -- it's difficult to grasp just how much of this is creative license -- Otsuka and Huang's particular prism on contemporary China -- and how much is simply hyper-capitalist realism.

This idea works better in the small details, however, and can feel a bit overbearing in its totality. One particular angle for understanding Stonewalling is the degree to which traditional filial piety and subservience has become reconfigured as a commodity, something Lynn's mother in particular can trade upon. Lynn is trying to strike out on her own, but her unwanted pregnancy coincides with her discovery of her mother's massive debt to a triad for allegedly causing a miscarriage. We see Lynn as she contemplates abortion, and lets that window close behind her in order to provide her baby as a chit for eradicating her mother's debt. It should be said, even though Lynn clearly feels obligated to make this disturbing trade, she also seems to think that it will heal the rift between her parents.

Similarly, the triad's young cousin, whose miscarriage was seemingly the cause of all the trouble, is striking as a background presence, usually absent but occasionally in tow, unable to tear her eyes away from her phone. Lynn tries to engage with her at one point, showing empathy and asking her to take good care of her baby. The girl can barely be bothered to answer, except to remark to Lynn, "you are so naive." At this point, something we've suspected all along is confirmed. Her pregnancy was terminated by the triad uncle in order to extort Lynn's mother. And whatever plans he has for Lynn's baby, they don't include making them a part of his family. Stonewalling recalls Johnny Ma's 2016 film Old Stone, in the sense that both films depict Chinese society as a lawless hellscape of human misery, almost by legal design. 

So Lynn may have qualms about selling her baby, but it's an act that's in keeping with the increasingly cheap value of human life. Besides, the father of the baby has made it clear that he wants the fetus disposed of. Zhang is controlling and casually cruel, but in the blandest way possible. He conducts his relationship with Lynn like a middle manager, spouting platitudes about "increasing her value" and his "investment" in her, less out of conviction than a sense that this is the only vocabulary he knows. Stonewalling marks an "advance," after a fashion, over works that is superficially resembles, especially the films of Jia and Hou Hsiao-hsien, inasmuch as the older filmmakers still look at Chinese capitalism as both a betrayed promise, and as Communism's funhouse-mirror reflection. Huang and Otsuka, on the other hand, depict a reality in which all other possibilities are foreclosed. As we observe Lynn, her restlessness is inchoate and gnawing, as if she were trying to express an emotion that doesn't exist in her native language. Existential need, the desire for a life lived on one's own terms, is an impossible fantasy.