Queens of the Qing Dynasty: Routine Operation, by David Bax

In a very early moment in Ashley McKenzie‘s Queens of the Qing Dynasty, an exploratory medical camera makes its way down the throat of a young woman named Star (Sarah Walker). Within the reality of the film, this is an action undertaken by Star’s doctors to see how much damage she has done by drinking poison in an attempt to die by suicide. But from where we sit as viewers, it’s an intriguingly discomfiting bit of experimental cinema, immediately bringing to mind Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s recent De Humani Corporis Fabrica. But while that film new and exciting ways to challenge us (and gross us out), McKenzie never really lives up to the comparison, instead settling into a kind of familiar arthouse languor that’s only occasionally as enchanting as it clearly wants to be.

Those moments that do stand out are often accompanied by the squelchy, almost otherworldly original electronic music on the soundtrack, provided by Cecile Believe and Yu Su. Both artists are new to me and, if I remember Queens of the Qing Dynasty for nothing else, it will be for the introduction to their work.

Both those artists are also based in Canada, as is McKenzie and essentially everything else about Queens of the Qing Dynasty. Shot entirely in Nova Scotia, it fits in with recent fare like Anne at 13,000 Ft. and The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open that embrace the specifics and particulars of their homeland, a place that Americans mostly see on film standing in for someplace else.

Also unmistakenly Canadian is the low lilt and inflection adopted by Walker to play Star (reportedly based on another acquaintance of McKenzie’s). Walker’s performance is a thing of wonder, so fully inhabited that the film at times seems like documentary. Star’s particularly bent way of engaging with the world is a seemingly contradictory but classically recognizable stoner mix of world-weariness and hopeful naivete. She’s both heartbreaking and hilarious to behold. Meanwhile, Ziyin Zheng as An, a hospital volunteer whom Star befriends, gives us a character who is perhaps just as unmoored in their own way, a queer immigrant who reminds us that Canada is more diverse than the Bobs and Dougs we tend to think of.

It’s just too bad that McKenzie can’t think of more to do with her two leads. Time and again, Queens of the Qing Dynasty returns to the same shot set-up of the characters looking at each other dead on but in profile to the camera and then holds it until the frame–and the entire movie–wears out its welcome.

McKenzie’s film, her sophomore feature length effort, started its journey at festivals, of course, playing the Berlinale in the “Encounters” section and playing Toronto in the “Wavelengths” section. Both programming categories are meant to be homes for experimental work. I only with Queens of the Qing Dynasty did more to qualify for that label.

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