SYDNEY CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL: Xiaowen Zhou’s understated yet potent drama tracks the plight of an uneducated teenager burdened with an unwanted child and very little means of support. Though intimate in its portrayal of a village girl’s yearnings for success in the big city despite her increasingly dire social circumstances, Lost (Baihe) offers a thought-provoking case study that suggests that this is not just the story of one fictional woman, but of a vast (and largely unspoken) cross-section of modern Chinese society.
Tracked down by struggling journalist Liu Nan (Lü Liping), we first meet Baihe (vibrant newcomer Wang Zitong) as she staggers through traffic, heavily pregnant, searching for 'Dragon Boy’ – the truck driver who promised much to bed the pretty teen but soon abandoned her. Recounting her story to Liu, Baihe’s life emerges as one of struggle buoyed by a hopeful spirit and unshakeable bond to her newborn son. Her plight is especially poignant as the boy is diagnosed with a heart murmur and she immediately needs RMB80,000 to have him treated.
Cinematographer Zhao Defeng’s strikingly-framed images of street-level Shenzen are compelling, but the film suffers from a first hour of narrative that lacks a strong momentum. It is essentially a series of re-enactments, as Baihe relates to Liu the failed job-hunting efforts she experienced in her search for the money that will save her child. The film takes a distinctly edgier tone when Baihe falls into an underworld market that caters for services that she knows are morally wrong but represent a poor teenager’s only options – brides-for-sale, organ removal and courtesan duties, to name a few. The film takes flight during a tense, moving sequence in which an emotionally-wrought Baihe temporarily abandons her baby.
With Lost (Baihe), Xiaowen Zhou returns to many of the themes and characterisations that served him well in his breakout Western hit, Ermo (1994). Both films transpose a woman of character and moral fibre from her rural home to the big city in search of a better (i.e. wealthier) life; both care for weaker males and both trade in the making and selling of traditional noodles. Yet Ermo sprang from a society hungry for the status of newfound capitalistic gain; from a country whose big cities still offered potential for wealth (even if, in Ermo’s case, that ultimately proved false). Lost (Baihe) can be seen as the post-GFC bookend to Ermo; of a country that has experienced a surge in wealth but also an abandonment of moral and social duty to its people.
Though sweetened by Wang Zitong’s winning performance, Xiaowen Zhou’s film ultimately offers a rather bleak (even slyly subversive) appraisal of modern Chinese society. After the conventionality of the first two acts, Lost (Baihe) ends with a bold piece of stylistic storytelling that suggests Baihe, her sick son and her patriotism-fuelled optimism never stood a chance. And that neon-lit, big-city China, still the beacon of prosperity for so many of its struggling countrymen, could really care less.
