‘Girls on Wire’ Review: A Sensitive but Unsteady Portrait of Chinese Generational Trauma and Sisterhood
When Fang Di (Wen Qi), a stunt performer clawing her way up China’s grueling film industry, sees her cousin Tian Tian (Liu Haocun), their reunion is a charged affair. The actress hasn’t spoken to her younger cousin in five years. She is also not in touch with the rest of their family. Cursed is the child who escapes a toxic home. The severance can mangle their sense of freedom, marring liberation with guilt and anger.
In Girls on Wire, Vivian Qu builds a sensitive portrait of two women trying to overcome familial trauma. The film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in competition, expands on themes presented in Qu’s Angels Wear White. The festival success and critical acclaim of Qu’s previous films mean that Girls on Wire will surely find fans in arthouse audiences in the U.S.
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Qu focuses on the ways young women are undervalued by society. But in Girls on Wire she also observes how the domestic sphere lays the groundwork for that exploitation. Fang Di and Tian Tian’s younger lives are portrayed through a series of flashbacks whose dreamy and nostalgic atmosphere (cinematography Zhang Chaoyi) belies a volcanic reality. While Fang Di’s mother (Peng Jing) struggles to save her garment factory, her brother, Tian’s Tian’s father (Zhou You), does little to curb his drug addiction. The siblings are trapped in an unsettling codependency, one in which a sister, as if fulfilling a Faustian bargain, funds her brother’s bad habits. As their parents fight, a young Fang Di and Tian Tian seek solace in each other’s company.
Interweaving the past with the cousins’ present-day reunion, Qu crafts an intimate narrative about how trauma ripples through generations. She considers how two people can emerge from the same environment differently, and her attention to the scars in Fang Di and Tian Tian’s tender relationship is particularly affecting.
Qu is also interested in the dynamics of the “Film City” where Fang Di works. The director stages humorous set pieces in the constructed city, which allows her to experiment with genre and compare the fabricated tension of a fake place with the real drama of an emotionally strained relationship. But this exploration undercuts the poignancy of Girls on Wire, adding a third, more opaque thread, to the film’s two clearer ones.
Girls on Wire begins with Tian Tian’s escape. The young woman, held against her will by a mysterious figure, kills her captor and flees into the night. With a blunt cut (editing by Yang Hongyu), we are plunged into the goings-on of Film City, where Fang Di battles with a prickly director asking her to do another take of an action sequence. The fate of the two cousins converge in a too-obviously contrived manner: Tian Tian, who kind of gets a job as a messenger near the studio, delivers a package to her cousin.
The initial encounter is frosty. Fang Di rejects her cousin on the grounds that Tian Tian just wants money. But the stunt performer and aspiring actress doesn’t have any. She’s still saddled with her family’s inherited debt, which she has been paying off slowly over the years. Tian Tian insists, with heartbreaking desperation, that she doesn’t want money. She just wants to re-establish a bond with her cousin, who is functionally a sister. They used to be so close, she muses at one point. What happened?
Qu uses that question, implied through Tian Tian and Fang Di’s first meeting after five years of estrangement, to kick off the flashbacks in Girls on Wire. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, rewinds the contemporary story to the 90s, where she observes Tian Tian and Fang Di’s family troubles in carefully rendered and vivid scenes.
The relationship between Tian Tian’s father and Fang Di’s mother is particularly haunting, because it highlights the compounding effect of substance abuse and uneven gender dynamics. Fang Di’s mother might be the breadwinner, supporting her parents, brother and brother’s child, but it doesn’t translate to respect. Tian Tian’s father, so subsumed by his drug dependency, is a volatile force whose undulating moods command the household. In the midst of this domestic stress, Fang Di keeps Tian Tian safe and distracted. Scenes of the older cousin covering the younger one’s ears as their parents fight, or of the two chasing each other through the garment factory, underscore their intimacy.
The ruptures to their relationship happen over years. In each flashback, Qu advances the story, showing how Fang Di and Tian Tian cope with their troubling circumstances. While Fang Di aspires to a life outside the home, Tian Tian accepts a fate in which she ends up similar to her father. In one memory, Fang Di returns home from college to find Tian Tian pregnant with a child. The father of the baby and the father’s family refuse to help the young woman, whom they see as disposable. Eventually, Fang Di, frustrated with her cousin’s decision to keep the baby and determined to protect herself, cuts herself off from the family.
The painful reverberations of that decision come to light in the present-day narrative, in which Qu maps the cousins’ reconciliation. Qi and Haocun give committed performances that are hampered by jarring tonal shifts in this timeline. While the cousins reacquaint themselves with one another, three mafiosos, sent by a mysterious lender, track them down. (An interesting but under-explored element of the film are the mob ties and how everyone seems to owe the same person money.)
Qu struggles to balance the melodrama of the cousin’s sororal story with the comic beats of these mafia men integrating themselves into the studio city. Humorous bits where the three men end up as extras in a scene clash with the subdued emotion of Tian Tian and Fang Di crying after opening old wounds. These narrative choices also make transitioning to the past slightly more awkward, especially as the stakes in the present-day thread increase.
Qu’s ambition to mix genres is admirable, and there are moments in Girls on Wire when the humor complements the sadness in a way that feels true to real life. But other times, the details of the fabricated studio world — a cutthroat environment of demanding directors, an overworked crew and punishing schedules — make for a more interesting story than the central one.
Nevertheless, the stronger elements of Girls on Wire — especially how Qu renders the emotional and psychic costs of freedom — make one curious to see what the filmmaker does next.
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