Stonewalling: Late Term Complications, by David Bax

Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka‘s Stonewalling completes a trilogy, started by Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird, of films that examine “the plight of young women in China,” according to Huang. Not being familiar with the previous two works, I can’t attest to how the new film sets itself apart but I can tell you that it bracingly details the dearth of options faced by such a woman, especially when she comes from a financially strained background. Perhaps becoming a flight attendant is a way out, both literally and figuratively. But that requires English lessons, which require money but also require time that may conflict with one’s ability to earn money, leaving one to depend on exploitative gig type jobs. Can we blame anyone in this position for seeking a shortcut? What if it means selling off an unwanted baby instead of having an abortion?

Stonewalling‘s photography, by Otsuka, illustrates the layers of complexity in the situation of young Lynn (Yao Honggui), using a mixture of lighting and blocking to underline depth in every set-up. The film does, I must point out, belong to the latter day class of movie framing in which actors often have their backs to the camera but the beauty more than overcomes this tiny annoyance. And, anyway, we can often spot glimpses of the faces in Otsuka’s use of reflections. He shoots Changsha, where Lynn lives with her boyfriend in the story’s opening chapters, as a city of glass, emphasizing modernity and thus making Lynn’s odyssey all the more urgent and present.

Yao, who also starred in both Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird, presumably as a version of the same character, plays Lynn as someone with brains enough to believably be a college student but with a lack of real world experience that makes her naïve. Her emotional intelligence comes through, especially in her interactions with her parents, but it’s only over time that we see her perceived shyness not as a weakness but as a learned mechanism for negotiating life and others.

Everything gets more complicated, not just for Lynn but for everyone in the world, when the COVID pandemic arrives. Huang and Otsuka use it as a narrative turn; anything to do with childbirth and adoption is complicated by the lockdown and other strictures. But it also brings some of their critiques of present day China into sharper relief.

Black market financial workarounds were already a part of Stonewalling‘s plot but COVID redirects the business of Lynn’s family into the presumably unauthorized reselling of masks and sanitizer. By capitalizing on the strife and misfortune of others, Lynn comes to embody the opposite side of the spectrum of exploitation from her experience as a young, expectant mother of an unwanted child.

Thus Huang and Otsuka obliterate any idea that there are good and bad guys in their story or in their vision of present day China. The end result is that no one is better off and everyone is sad. Stonewalling achieves the kind of heartbreaking summation of the world that comes along with any well-rounded understanding of its facts and realities.