Yanagawa (Zhang Lu, 2021)

Back in 2014, when TIFF was still doing its City to City program(me), I covered the entire slate of films that year. The focus was on Seoul, and as often happens when cramming for festival coverage, a lot of those films became a blur. Even having written about them all for Cinema Scope, very few of them made a lasting impression. One of those films was Gyeongju by Chinese director Zhang Lu. I barely remember it, and what I do recall struck me as second-rate Hong Sangsoo. Zhang seems to be one of those directors who has been on the cusp of breaking through for over a decade, and it's possible that it is finally happening. His latest film The Shadowless Tower was given a competition slot at this year's Berlinale, and the reviews ranged from the admiring to the ecstatic. So we'll see.

In light of this, I decided to watch Yanagawa, his previous film, which appears to have been given a one-week run in New York City.* I'm very glad I did, despite the fact that I remain fairly ambivalent about Zhang and his project. This is a film that spends its first hour wandering aimlessly, and then shifting into female objectification mode, but then successfully bringing all of the simmering subtext to the fore, resulting in a genuine impact. A perplexing, disconnected scene from the beginning of Yanagawa turns out to have been the passkey for everything that followed.

Two brothers, Chun (Xin Baiqing) and Dong (Zhang Luyi), find themselves at an emotional impasse and decide to travel to Japan to find a woman they knew twenty years ago. Her name is A-Chuan (Ni Ni), and both brothers were smitten with her at that time. Chun, the cruder and more aggressive brother, managed to date A-Chuan before unceremoniously dumping her. Dong just admired her from a distance. Soon after, A-Chuan moved to London, and then settled in Yanagawa, "the Venice of Japan," simply because her Chinese name would be "yanagawa" in Japanese.

Zhang tends to overplay such coincidences, resulting in obvious literary tropes that are presented as if they were naturalistic occurrences. For example, we learn that Yoko Ono is from Yanagawa, and her presence -- a poster for her new album, a random busker playing "Oh Yoko" -- hovers over the film. Same with Kazuo Ishiguro, who A-Chuan met while living in London. Zhang keeps bringing him up as an emblem of the cosmopolitanism and continual translation that is one of Yanagawa's main thematic concerns.

These elements seem all the more heavy-handed because so much of Yanagawa is studiedly unemphatic. Like a Hong Sangsoo scenario filtered through the placid aesthetic of Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yanagawa is at once discomfiting and anodyne. Long periods occur in which nothing notable happens, but there is not the forceful slow-cinema approach that usually compensates for such inactivity. What there is, mainly, is both brothers foisting their fantasies and anxieties onto A-Chuan. They treat her as a manic-pixie, and neither she nor the film summon the energy to fight against this stereotyping.

In a way, A-Chuan is frustratingly incidental to Yanagawa, even though Zhang does provide hints that she is a sad, lonely individual who nurtures mystique in order to keep people away. Mostly though we are stuck with Chun and Dong's fetishization of her, although that comes in two very distinct flavors. Chun, who is married with a kid, has tracked A-Chuan down so she can be his midlife-crisis fling. Dong's reasons for tagging along are unclear at first, but his fixation on A-Chuan is just as powerful. For him, she represents all the lives he never lived, the chances he was too scared to take.

Yanagawa's coda, which takes place one year after the brothers' trip to Japan, explains exactly what Zhang has been up to. Rhyming as it does with the opening scene, which the rest of the movie actually encourages us to ignore or forget, the end of the film certainly places everything we've seen in a different light. Still, it feels like too little too late. Zhang may intend to shed light on the domineering relationship of Chun to Dong, or to position Dong's diffidence as depression or another mental illness. But since he's unwilling to push Yanagawa in any particular direction, the dominant impression is one of male prerogative, a woman being cast as the repository for nostalgia and regret. Zhang Lu is obviously talented, but I'm not sure I'm on his wavelength.

*NOTE: I discovered that in fact Yanagawa was "released" online through Film Movement Plus. This seems to warrant a New York Times review now.