Locarno Film Festival 2021: ‘Virgin Blue’ Review (Concorso Cineasti del presente)
An elusive impression of a family’s intersection of its past and present emanates from Niu Xiaoyu’s Virgin Blue, presented at the 74th Locarno Film Festival.
In one of the more challenging and rigorous films from the whole 74th Locarno Film Festival program, Virgin Blue (original title: Bu yao zai jian a, Yu hua tang), by Chinese director Niu Xiaoyu, transports its viewers to a cryptic world of memory and ancestral history. Loosely adapted and borrowing its title from the 1997 novel by Tracy Chevalier, Virgin Blue tells the story of a woman discovering her family history where the narrative threads the past and present together. For Niu, she uses this base line as the skeleton for the structure of her film. We are first introduced to Yezi, a fresh graduate from college who visits her grandmother during her summer vacation after a hospital visit where she discovers and is diagnosed presumptively with hypoplasia. Yezi’s overall joyless attitude evokes an ambiguous underlining question to her behavior: Trauma? Depression? What’s next? Upon Yezi’s arrival of her grandmother’s apartment, she already knows that her grandmother’s memory is disintegrating and amnesia, starts to set in. The apartment, or home of the grandmother and Yezi’s in the past, begins to unfold as a landscape of fragmented memories of the past weaving into the present.
The film deals with many non-linear narrative realities; Yezi’s visit to her grandmother, the grandmother’s memories entering the apartment into Yezi’s consciousness, and the meta-film crew documenting the culmination of the first two, and familial visions told through mythological hand-drawn pictures. The most fascinating element of the film is how formally, Niu intertwines the different elements of the disoriented state of dreams causing an illogical, but captivating experience. This includes the breaking the fourth wall with a film crew in reflection, impromptu karaoke neon-dripped scenes of an afterlife, and ghostly appearances from the past, which all exudes the precise vision Niu wanted to capture. Niu is more focused on capturing a feeling, she shows us more themes that strengthen these spiritual feelings such as reincarnation, mythology, and the long-lasting question of what is next for us, for Yezi, which is what’s next in her life, and her grandmother, life after death. As the central narrative following Yezi continues to go down its path, it is evident that this film doesn’t necessarily care about plot, but the emotions of Yezi’s yearning, acceptance, family history, and interactions.
The film’s denseness simply cannot be put into words as the film cultivates the haziness of being in and waking up from a dream. Influenced and even referencing scenes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul and early Tsai Ming-liang films, Virgin Blue is appropriately comparable to their films due to the spirituality and uses of song. Its setting of the grandmother’s home expands on the theme of history and while most of the film’s duration is in the grandmother’s apartment, the memories, past, present, and even the film crew is depicted in almost the entire film. The sense of crossing paths in a single setting, be it the past or present, fiction or non-fiction, leaves a poignant outlook on the memories one has.
