“As Bystanders,” Says the Director of Angels Wear White, “We All Have to Ask What Our Real Responsibility Is” | Interviews ⑪

“The role of the bystander very badly needs to be thought about and examined.”

In early 2014, a small city in Guangxi put up a statue of Marilyn Monroe billed as the tallest in the world. Six months later it came down, because “Monroe’s skirt flew too high.” Struck by how strongly residents reacted in the news coverage, producer and director Vivian Qu polled her female friends: what does Monroe mean to you? Most gave the expected answers — “charming,” “sexy.” One said Monroe stood for “everything except love.”

That, Qu realized, was the whole story she wanted to tell: a story about a “carnival era.”

“Carnival” became Angels Wear White (Chinese title 《嘉年华》, “Carnival”). It opens like this:

A seaside town in southern China. On a crowded white beach stands a Marilyn Monroe statue nearly two meters tall, in a white skirt, striking the pose from The Seven Year Itch. At dusk, Xiaomi, a girl who works at a hotel, is walking on the beach. She looks up at the statue; sunlight comes straight through Monroe’s legs, and two schoolgirls busy taking photos knock into her. That night Xiaomi runs into the same two girls again — they check into the hotel where she works. In the middle of the night, Xiaomi sees on the security monitor that the middle-aged man who brought them there has forced his way into the girls’ room.

At the Pingyao International Film Festival in early November, Angels Wear White won Best Film in the Fei Mu Honors section. Before that it had been nominated for three Golden Horse Awards — Best Narrative Feature, Best Director and Best Actress — and in early 2017 it was selected for the main competition of the 74th Venice Film Festival.

During the Venice festival, foreign critics called this realist film about the sexual assault of underage girls “a vivid reflection of the survival struggles of women in contemporary China.” Its handling of how women live, how adolescents are educated, and how power works in society also made it one of the year’s most closely watched independent Chinese-language films.

Angels Wear White opened in theaters nationwide on November 24, 2017. A Douban user going by “Luo Delai” wrote in a recommendation: “The helpless parents in the film, the parents who cover up the truth themselves, the doctor who vouches for the official who committed the assault — that is only a small concentration of reality.”

Qu could not have foreseen any of this, but Angels Wear White came to be read as an echo of the Beijing RYB Kindergarten case, in which children were abused and, it was suspected, molested.

Angels Wear White is Qu’s second film as a director. From Venice to Pingyao, she has explained the title to audiences over and over: we live in a carnival-like era, everyone strapped into a roller coaster, with no time or patience to look again at what growing up means. The two girls assaulted in the film are, of course, also in the “carnival” stretch of their own lives.

Until now, Qu was better known as an independent film producer. In 2014, Black Coal, Thin Ice, directed by Diao Yinan and produced by her, won the Golden Bear and Best Actor at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.

Unlike most producers, Qu offers more creative input during a shoot. Diao recalls that on Black Coal, Thin Ice, Qu gave precise opinions on everything from whether to use a small jib arm in certain scenes to the scarf worn by lead actress Guey Lun-mei. “Her role went far beyond that of an ordinary producer… The collaborators around me are usually cut from the same cloth as me — I’m artsy, and they’re even artsier than I am, maybe even more extreme. But Qu can balance that out. She’s calmer, more objective.”

At the Q&A after the Pingyao premiere of Angels Wear White, Qu wore a black suit jacket and black wide-leg trousers. Standing at the center of the stage, she looked taller than anyone in the crowd. “Good expression always has to be calm,” she said. “When you’re especially worked up, what you say is usually wrong.”

Before 2003, Qu studied art history in New York. She went into film because “film could combine all her interests into a single art form.” Back in China, she found that Chinese filmmakers had good ideas and good scripts but lacked the resources to produce films and sell them to international audiences. So she began working with directors including Yin Lichuan and Diao Yinan, producing Knitting (《牛郎织女》), Spring Dream (《春梦》) and Night Train (《夜车》), and helping them find suitable overseas investors and screening slots.

After producing several films, Qu directed her own first feature, Trap Street (《水印街》), in 2013. It is a love story widely read as political allegory. A mapmaker on a surveying job finds a “ghost street” — satellites can detect it, yet it appears on no map — and anyone who tries to identify it through public records ends up trapped by it. On that street he meets a mysterious woman and quickly falls in love with her.

Trap Street was never released publicly on the mainland. It screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and was selected for Venice, Rotterdam and other festivals. Critics read that loaded “street that doesn’t exist” as a figure for how power shapes technology and the public. The way a political force field muscles into an ordinary love story also reminded many viewers of 1984.

Angels Wear White works the same way. Qu has always had an urge to narrate real life, and a distanced way of presenting a story — much like the woman herself, who tends to sit in a corner and watch quietly. In Trap Street she shot ordinary Nanjing streets in long takes; in Angels Wear White, that same watching is condensed into an unnamed small town, the giant characters reading “Serve the People” outside the police station, and the scene of doctors collectively giving the girl a gynecological exam after the case is reported. A review out of Toronto once called her social criticism savage, subtle and precise. Qu says what she most wants to get across is that the worst thing does not happen on the night of the assault.

The film’s English title, Angels Wear White, reads in Chinese as “angels in white.” At the end of the film the giant Monroe statue has been taken down; a truck hauls it away, and the bare legs under the white skirt are pasted over with flyers.

Angels Wear White’s share of screenings in Chinese theaters has now risen from 0.9% to 1.5%.

Q: QDaily

Vivian Qu: Director, Producer

Q: In writing and shooting this film, did you consciously bring in your own identity and imagination?

Qu: Of course — although my own upbringing was actually pretty dull. My parents didn’t treat me particularly as a girl either, so I don’t have a strong sense of “especially girlish things.” So I do a lot of watching — the people around me, including their children now, their little girls. But I think there are some very basic things all of us share as women. I’m not deliberately or self-consciously writing about myself, of course. But most of the women I draw have something tough in their character, and that may be a bit like me.

Q: Are you that kind of especially tough person?

Qu: I mean the women I like. Whatever their circumstances, however far their awareness has gone, I like it when there’s something tough in their character. I don’t like people who always have to please others, always have to flatter others; I don’t like women with no confidence at all. I like people with that toughness, so I write them into my films.

Q: Did this film start from a real event?

Qu: It’s really a combination of many things. I don’t much like simply recording one case, taking something already real and complete and turning it into a film — that isn’t the kind of work I enjoy. I read a lot of news on this subject and I know many such things happen, ending in all sorts of ways. I tried to find what they have in common: some of these cases were solved, some weren’t, some were never even filed, but the harm to the girls never stopped. What I wanted to look at was the mechanism of society as a whole. A single case always has something accidental about it, but what kind of mechanism a society has is not accidental at all. If that mechanism isn’t healthy enough, it does the victims a second harm, or more.

Q: The perpetrator himself is shown very vaguely in the film. Why?

Qu: Right, Chairman Liu barely shows his face in the film at all, because who he is matters very little. There are plenty of people like him in the world. What matters is the people around us — the ones who keep turning up around us — and how a society responds to something like this.

Q: Is money hard to raise for a film like this?

Qu: It was fine, actually. Domestic companies and private investors put in money, and this time we also found some foreign foundations to invest. My earlier films involved independent film foundations too.

Q: Are you personally drawn to subjects about women?

Qu: It’s just that as a woman I naturally pay attention to these things. But it isn’t that I’m confined to films about women, to telling women’s stories — that’s not the case. Whatever moves me most at the time is the story I go and make.

Q: Has anything moved you recently?

Qu: I’ve been talking about this film every single day lately, so I haven’t had time to think about anything else. But sexual assault, sexual harassment and sex discrimination are being argued about everywhere in the world right now, because some cases in the West have just come to light. So the slogan for our film is “Break the Silence.” I think this really is an important thing at the moment. Look at the West: everyone says we’ve known about this for years, and only today has someone finally stepped forward to say it. That’s a strange phenomenon. By rights we should have broken the silence 50 years ago and moved on to the next stage long since; instead we’re back at the starting point, only just able to discuss it at all. So that’s what I’m paying most attention to now; maybe later I’ll think about other problems.

Q: What do you think has caused this long silence among women, and could it go on forever?

Qu: I think the problem in China right now is that many of us aren’t conscious of these things at all. In the West, because of the feminist movement, most people at least know the problem exists, so schools and many institutions have put measures in place. That doesn’t prevent such things entirely, of course, but at least people are conscious of it — they recognize quickly what kind of problem is being discussed. In China, with problems like sexual harassment, even the girls involved often don’t register that it is sexual harassment. So I think the need is more urgent for us. People at least have to become aware of it.

Q: The women in the film come from different classes and backgrounds. Do you think moving up in class can bring women a self-awakening?

Qu: Not really. I think it varies from person to person. Education is certainly one factor, but not an absolute one. I’ve also seen that among people higher up, or among intellectuals, women’s anxieties and troubles are still very severe — they don’t disappear because of that.

Q: Why put an observer like Xiaomi into a story like this?

Qu: Maybe I’m the sort of person who likes to sit in a corner and watch quietly. Our society, largely because the internet is so developed, has suddenly made all of us bystanders to a great many events, right? Before the internet you probably only knew what was happening around you; now you’re instantly a bystander to countless things, and people love to speak up online on top of that, so you feel as if you’re close to these events. But what do we actually do? As bystanders we stand here and toss off a few idle remarks. I think the role of the bystander very badly needs to be thought about and examined. That’s why I created Xiaomi.

Sometimes I think we’re consuming events. Never mind that sometimes we’re simply cold — we even consume certain events, and the sympathy we express isn’t sincere. So I think we really do need to reflect: as bystanders, what is our responsibility, what is our real responsibility, what should we do, what can we do.

Q: What did that reflection lead you to? Could being a bystander be the beginning of change around an event, or is there something more we should do than watch?

Qu: You could call it a beginning. But without the right attitude it may not produce anything genuinely useful. My own thinking is that we should do our own jobs well. As a citizen I have a responsibility to think about the many social problems around me. As a filmmaker I should express, truthfully, what I see and think about this society in my films. That’s the first step. Then if the film comes out and reaches other people, affects them, brings something positive to society, I think I’ve done at least a small part of my duty as a bystander.

Q: So the film is really a concentrated version of your thinking about this whole run of events?

Qu: Yes. Because rather than say a couple of things online, I think it’s worth more to think it through and release it in this form in the end.

Q: The frustration in the film is very pronounced. Is that a feeling from your own life, and is that kind of frustration universal among women?

Qu: I think it is universal. As I said, I think Chinese women’s anxiety far exceeds that of Western women, and it really does seep into every corner of life. Sometimes the thing isn’t big, but it’s there. You have to spend time and energy dealing with these annoyances. At work, in daily life, it’s at least not very pleasant.

It’s like seeing a woman you think is very successful, very happy, very confident. She’s a role model for us. And you think, how rare, how hard that must have been. Why do you feel that? Because there are so few of them. Most women carry a lot of anxiety. She wonders whether she’s good-looking enough, whether she’ll fail to find a boyfriend, whether a boyfriend will say, “You know too much, I don’t like that.” Once a woman passes 40 especially, she becomes unsure of herself about all sorts of things, marriage included. I feel there is very little of that sense of happiness among Chinese women. It puzzles me — why is it like this? It shouldn’t be.

Some people say that in China you now have to be exceptionally strong inside to live happily as a woman. I don’t think that’s how it should be. An ordinary woman should be able to find her place, fairly smoothly, and find her own happiness. That’s what I hope for.

Q: You give off a sense of calm yourself. Is that your normal state?

Qu: I think good expression always has to be calm. When you’re especially worked up, what you say is usually wrong. I didn’t want to make a film that felt like me airing my grievances. That would be entirely the wrong attitude — otherwise we turn into Xianglin’s Wife, Lu Xun’s widow who tells her sorrow to anyone who’ll listen. All we want is to set the problem out as objectively and calmly as we can. I’m not simply accusing, simply condemning, because that’s too crude. The finer thing is to say: this problem of ours belongs to the whole society, and all of us have to solve it together. So as far as possible I want everyone to see that behind all these many problems the root lies at a single point — and that point may be something two thousand years of culture left behind. If we really want to change it, everyone bears responsibility. So how would you talk about that without being calm? Filmmaking is the same. A film isn’t something you can pull off on impulse.

Q: From Trap Street to Angels Wear White, your work leans heavily on realist subjects. Do you consciously try to make the film and reality look back at each other?

Qu: Yes, and it’s something I’ve felt more strongly over the years. We live in this kind of society, yet films that truly and honestly reflect it are relatively few. So I do feel we have a responsibility. If Chinese cinema as a whole were reflecting reality deeply, maybe I’d go make something completely different. Your interests can always expand — film isn’t limited to any one thing — but I feel that right now, as Chinese people, we badly need films that look straight at our reality. So I think that’s a very important thing at the moment.

Q: Beyond reflecting reality through film, do you consciously hope to change anything?

Qu: From a creator’s point of view, thinking that way probably makes too much of oneself — it’s a bit arrogant. But I believe anything can bring change; even things that look unimportant can end up changing a society. So I put my hope in that collective human power. One film of mine can’t possibly do anything enormous, but if my film moves you and you do even one thing differently in your life, then if a million people see this film, maybe a million things happen. That, I think, is what change will be.

Q: At screenings we notice that men and women respond to the film in completely different ways.

Qu: That’s right. The difference is there, but sometimes it isn’t a matter of men and women — it may just be that you pay attention to different things in life. To come back to what everyone asks me, why is it called “Carnival”? Because real life does have a great many eye-catching things, glossy, dazzling things, and the focus of our lives tends to stop at seeing them, without seeing what’s behind them. So all this film hopes is that people can look past the glossy, brightly colored set dressing and see some of what stands behind it.

Cover image from: Douban