The Cloud in Her Room (Zheng Lu Xinyuan, 2020)

Zheng Lu Xinyuan's The Cloud in Her Room is a forbidding film at first. Although it quite clearly centers on the life and relationships of Muza (Jin Jing), many of these connections are held in suspension for quite some time. This is a film that abjures exposition, and even more than this, keeps its main character at a notable remove. But there's a nagging sense that we are missing key bits of information that are right in front of us. That's because Zheng Lu and cinematographer Matthias Delvaux orchestrate a visual style that is radically at odds with Cloud's elliptical narrative. We are constantly treated to close-ups of the pensive, often reactive Muza, and the film's approach to composition and cityscape is rigorous and exacting. This is a gorgeous film, composed with a photographer's eye.

This is the formal contradiction that drives The Cloud in Her Room. As the outward trappings of the film imply a piercing clarity, the figure at the core of this design is maddeningly opaque. This is because Muza is a woman in transit, moving between various spaces, adjusting to their contours, but never actually finding a place she belongs. The main action of the film is occasioned by Muza's return to her hometown of Hangzhou for the holidays. She first visits with her father (Ye Hongming) and his family, and it takes some time for us to recognize that her father's wife (Liang Cuishan) is not Muza's mother. At one point, Muza asks her stepmother if they will ever tell her half-sister Niu (Wang Ruiwen) that they only share a father. This remark isn't pursued, but it indicates the extent to which human connections in Cloud remain adamantly undefined.

When Muza meets up with her mother (Liu Dan), the two of them go out for drinks and karaoke, and their interactions read much more like a tense friendship between peers than a mother-daughter relationship. In one of the film's occasional drifts into abstraction, we see mother and daughter in close-up, beginning to kiss like lovers. This sequence is one of several that is shown in black-and-white reversal, suggesting that this reflects Muza's imagination or unconscious. In this respect, we are given more interior insight into Muza, but this glimpse only makes matters more confusing.

Throughout the film, Muza bounces back and forth between her noncommittal old boyfriend Yu Fei (Chen Zhao) and a new acquaintance (Dong Kangning), an older man she met at one of Niu's school functions. He owns a bar, and after Muza goes there with friends, the two of them meet up casually for platonic, almost fatherly conversations about her future. The dichotomy between Yu Fei and the bartender demonstrates Muza's inability to get a handle on things in her life, as she has gravitated toward two unsuitable men who, if they were combined, might serve as a plausible love interest. Yet it is not clear that Muza even realizes this.

It could be said that The Cloud in Her Room proceeds in a manner more befitting music than narrative cinema. Muza is a kind of ionic form around which other people and places hover and swirl, but everyone and everything remains at a fixed distance. We cannot even be certain whether this drifting life represents an emotional hardship for Muza. It is as though she paradoxically achieves a kind of passionate indeterminacy. Although there is no concrete referent for Zheng Lu's chosen title, it's hard to think of a more fitting description of Muza. She is vapor. She expands, but remains diffuse.

The one solid refrain in the film has to do with an empty, disused location from the past. Although Muza's parents have been split for a long time, her father is only just getting around to putting their old apartment on the market. Muza returns to this place on several occasions, wandering around, opening and closing windows, fiddling with tchotchkes and photographs left behind. When Muza comes back home, the only place she feels she belongs is in this abandoned flat, where she can be alone with her memories. Perhaps this place harks back to a time when she knew who she was. But Zheng Lu leaves this question open. The Cloud in Her Room is a beautifully wrought object defined by its negative space.