RIPPLES OF LIFE

DIRECTOR: WEI SHUJUN
123 MINS, CHINA-QATAR, 2021, SUBTITLED

Official Selection, Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes International Film Festival 2021

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
TIANXIANG WANG.


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Wei Shujun’s enthralling second feature follows a film crew on location in the remote town of Yong’an in southern China to prepare for a shoot. Ripples of Life divides into three chapters revolving around our four protagonists. In the first part, a new mother and waitress who works in her in-law’s local restaurant catering for the film production; the second part revolves around the lead, a famous actress returning to her hometown for the first time since her youth; while the third talkative part focuses on both screenwriter and director as they ruminate on the act of filmmaking.

Working with a mix of professional and non-professional actors, this is dynamic, smooth humoured, satirical social commentary. Filled with poignant moments and observation on both cosmopolitan and rural people, it is also a reflection on the meaning and process of art versus commerce and the pursuit of authenticity in cinema.

NOTES BY MARIE-PIERRE RICHARD

Film introduction by Tianxiang WANG. Tianxiang WANG is currently a PhD student at Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway. His research focuses on urban space in contemporary Chinese cinema. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in the Department of Literature, Beijing Film Academy in 2015. After graduation, he worked for three years as a practitioner and screenwriter in the film and television industry in China.

Ripples of Life- Introduction

Ripples of Life is the second feature of Chinese director Wei Shujun, and before this film, Wei had already developed an idiosyncratic creative style and distinctive auteurship, which were embodied in his feature debut Striding into the Wind, an autobiographical film that depicts the powerlessness and impotency of urban youth in the face of a highly capitalised and institutionalised contemporary Chinese society and is full of the director’s self-deprecation.

The comic tone of the whole film is not simply to provide a sense of humour but mixed with a sense of depression, which makes the film cynical and sophisticated. It is such a sense of cynicism and satire that allows Director Wei his social observation to be foregrounded, enabling him to play with contemporary people’s subtle spiritual and psychological dynamics under the impact of the spread of neoliberalism and globalisation in contemporary China.

Wei’s cynicism and his keen observation of contemporary Chinese urban society continue in Ripples of Life, informing this film’s form as well as style. Set in a small town called Yong’an in South China, the narrative of Ripples of Life employs a three-chapter structure, telling three interrelated stories around an outside film crew as they prepare for upcoming filmmaking in this place. Each story contains a wealth of information that can open a space for us to know about contemporary China from a specific perspective.

By focusing on the contingent connection established between a local young woman in Yong’an and the film crew, the first story allegorically links the town with an essentialist female identity, implying that, in order to better survive in the society increasingly dominated by capitalism and neoliberalism, the developing small Chinese town unconsciously self-feminizes and self-exhibits itself and ultimately submits itself to the gaze and romantic imagination of the modernity, which is marked as male.

The second story focuses on an actress, who is a previous Yong’an native to be starred in the film made in her hometown. This story portrays her inability to relive the simple life in her hometown with her childhood friends as they ceaselessly capitalise on her fame and power for their own interests. This story foregrounds the identity rupture and the dissonance between different social values brought about by social change in contemporary China.

The last story depicts the process by which the divergence on script between the director and the scriptwriter and their conflicts intensify before filming begins. This story is not only director Wei Shujun’s observation of the current ecology of Chinese art filmmaking, but also his self-reflexive rumination on filmmaking per se.

So in general Ripples of Life is full of director Wei Shujun’s style and his sophisticated reflection on contemporary Chinese society but also on filmmaking per se.

I hope that you can enjoy this special movie.

Thank you very much.

Tianxiang WANG

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