I can't help but recall Hirokazu Kore-eda's recent disappointment Broker when watching Stonewalling, the latest feature drama from collaborators Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka. Though Stonewalling is not a quirky, sentimental road movie, it is bounded to Broker by the shared theme of illicit adoption. An independent Chinese production, there will be those who argue that the narrative of Huang and Otsuka's film is far too particular to the on-going consequences of the "one-child policy" of the People's Republic (abolished in 2015) to create such a flat juxtaposition between the films. While this may be true to a certain extent, and while Stonewalling is certainly a very different film than Broker, there's no getting around how the timing of both films paints a common tableau of just one aspect of contemporary life in southeast Asia that transcends apparently sweeping distinctions of political history, systems, and policies. The reckoning that both Broker and Stonewalling represent is not legalistically bordered, but clearly geopolitical. It is implicit of desperations and anxieties generated by a host of comorbid environmental and economic phenomena that tie together the experiences of the world's precarious much more than they can be delineated by the superficial content of mainstream media, or propaganda. The distinction between the two, on the main, is that whereas Broker proved to be a decidedly mediocre picture, unserious in both social and moral terms, Stonewalling presents a much more grounded story that, while presented in such seemingly stark and observational terms, engenders a touching resonance.
The film stars Honggui Yao as Lynn, a 20-year-old college student who we are introduced to at a garden party celebrating a graduating class of advanced English-learners, including her boyfriend. He pressures her to be more involved, to make connections with the people there, but her heart just isn't in it. As we follow the couple through successive days, we come to realize how much of their personal lives are dominated by professional pressures, and how these in turn are tethered to the vacillations of the gig economy. Whereas her boyfriend freelances as a model and an MC for various formal events, Lynn is ostensibly studying to become a flight attendant. And if she feels motivated enough to pursue a gig here and there, her options are much less personally fulfilling and, not coincidentally, heavily gendered. She might try her hand as an outdoor "living mannequin" for a jewelry store sales event, for instance; and despite her boyfriend's frustrated admonitions about her lack of seriousness in learning English, her career path, and especially her failure to make professional connections, she finds herself treated as little more than a flattering object when she actually tries to be out-going with her one-time employers.
The portrait that Huang and Otsuka paint of millennial malaise won't feel terribly out of the ordinary to most audiences, especially at the select arthouses to which U.S. distributor Kimstim Films is tailoring its still very limited rollout. (The film's east coast residence appears to be exclusive to the Lincoln Center in New York, whereas I only just caught Stonewalling at the tail end of a short run at the Philadelphia Film Society.) But for outsiders, and in fairness to a nationally-centered reading, the implicit gravity of China's "one-child policy" shouldn't be understated. Very many American millennials and foreign film aficionados will no doubt find Lynn's general generational condition familiar. Whether they find it sympathetic or, like her boyfriend, rather annoying, is a toss-up. But besides ephemeral social pressures, it turns out that much of the money Lynn makes goes to her parents anyway. Getting on in years, her mother and father run a small, failing medical clinic, and are increasingly dependent upon their daughter to not simply make up her mind and achieve on their behalf, but to scrape together support in whatever way that she can. Matters are exacerbated when her mother, who is herself getting swept up in a multi-level marketing scheme hocking holistic skin creams, is accused of medical malpractice resulting in the death of a pregnant patient's unborn infant, forcing her to settle for paying the heavy damages in monthly installments. This combination of personal and general factors leads Lynn to consider applying to an agency that sells women's embryos, only for Lynn herself to discover, following a medical examination, that she is already one month pregnant. Aimless about her future, pressured on all sides, and terrified by the prospect of inducing an abortion, Lynn instead moves back with her parents, cuts off ties with her boyfriend, and conspires with her mother to illicitly exchange the baby as an alternative to paying her debts.
Chronicling Lynn's experiences throughout the next year, working all the while and dovetailing with the outbreak of the "Wuhan disease," Stonewalling turns out to be about much more than just generational ennui. It is telling that Honggui, who previously starred in Huang and Otsuka's The Foolish Bird, is now playing a character with the same name, "Lynn," but is not specifically reprising a role. Rather, this fictive "Lynn," while certainly the protagonist of both films, is presented as something of a cypher for the various interconnected themes that the filmmakers wish to explore. Though centered in the narrative, Honggui's character and performance is also frequently, obliquely de-centered, with virtually the entire film constructed around scenes that are observed in single, static, wide shots that suggest something of a photo vivant, with our eyes drawn into the entire scene and its various independent factors and what they suggest at any given moment, rather than just Lynn's emotional journey. In some cases, Lynn's face is either turned away from us, shrouded in darkness, or obscured by another character entirely, forcing us to understand the character just as much, if not more so, through her individual body, through her discomfort and contortion, rather than through her facial expression.
In this way, Stonewalling peers beyond both coming-of-age cliches and, it should be said, the limiting framework of interpreting the film as a narrow commentary on the lingering effects of the "one-child policy." Besides the cynicism and alienation of the gig economy, the beauty of modern China's superficial prosperity contrasted with the rat-race of opportunities, the film in its patchwork becomes just as much about the story of Lynn's own mother, for instance, and the strange new youthful independence she finds in the cult-like pageant and individual prosperity gospel of the MLM. There's also, of course, the omnipresent suggestion of the marketization of human reproduction, both sanctioned and illicit. Lynn's plan with her mother is, of course, illegal, but that doesn't seem to count for much when it comes to the "Boss" brokering the exchange, who turns out, in a bit of satiric irony, to be the owner of a chain of kindergartens. (That part may be a bit too on the nose, but the film carries off that contrivance well enough.) Lynn may not be able to sell her eggs herself, but she does pick up some work assisting at a temporary hostel for the same agency. She thus discovers that all three of the current donors, the "Xinjiang girls," are young Uyghur women, and we get a suggestion of the extent to which the same ethnic minorities that are the victims of hegemonic abuse in China nonetheless also undergird the country's ambitions to fortify its reproductive constitution. One of the most enigmatic, tense, but not at all melodramatically overstated scenes in the film is when Lynn accompanies one of these Xinjiang girls to an interview with a client, who is very enthusiastic that his prospective donor should show off her skills in traditional Uyghur dance.
It would be one thing to call the trajectory of Stonewalling merely fascinating, but what proves most impressive about the film is not only how emotionally involving it is, but more so how consistent and focused it all turns out. The Foolish Bird was not nearly so impressive in this regard. But as an implicitly spiritual follow-up, Honggui once again anchoring the enterprise, this new film is decidedly more mature and, despite its length, concise in its explorations. The "stonewalling" of the title obviously refers to Lynn's signature behavior throughout the narrative. It characterizes the stubbornness of making decisions that are only consequential in the extent that they kick the can down the road, putting off resolutions to much deeper existential problems. But with Lynn also acting as a cypher, the title comes to implicate a characterization of China as a whole. The optics of prosperity, of upward mobility and progression, are transformed into a vivid picture of not merely a general malaise or alienation, but of a specific and categorical avoidance, a collective aversion to the acknowledgment of stasis and then decline that not only cannot be repaired by reformation of reproductive rights, but exposes reproductive rights themselves as a totemic symptom of a wider ideological fantasy. Like Lynn herself, China does not, in the terms of American propaganda, "want babies." What it wants is collateral; an abject to be given up in the pursuit of something far more cynical, with a gospel of prosperity dressing up a spiritual decay.
At the risk of spoilers, a definitive moment of the film comes when Lynn finally meets the ostensible mother of her child, who turns out to be a girl even younger than she is. When this girl shows no interest in either Lynn or even the health of the baby, and simply stares at her phone, Lynn is incensed. The girl simply dismisses her as "naive," and walks away. It's a powerful moment, but it's especially the accusation of Lynn's naïveté that disturbs so much of what we understand the story, the rationale of Stonewalling, to be. Is Lynn's own mother telling her the whole truth about the debts she owes, or the "deal" that she made voluntarily, and without explicit pressure? Or is there something else more nefarious going on; a conspiracy of silence, Lynn acting in her worst interests by suggestion rather than coercive force? Huang and Otsuka make, in this case, the appropriate decision to assault the viewer with the implications of this scene, but never to resolve it dramatically. Even on the question of basic meaning, of purpose and reason for being, Lynn, and the audience themselves are, in effect, stonewalled.
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