An eighteen year old Chinese girl Sasha (played wonderfully by Ling Li) arrives at San Francisco airport with much weighed on her mind. Her intention is to get an abortion, no easy choice, but this is complicated by a sequence of events while she trails through the city. Her mind is full of sadness compounded by the fact that the father of the baby, after a one night stand in Beijing fails to acknowledge her and her plight.

She is still part in child mode, with many childish fantasies, but facing up to an adult situation. She is without parental guidance, later we find out she lives in fear of her mother. This film, directed by Wayne Wang’ is part of a sequence, the companion piece being “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” It is a small budget film co-directed by Richard Wong and it is characterized by jerky camera movements, as if wanting to portray a hand held, almost home movie effect.

There is a penchant for unconventional shots, sometimes blurred , fractured highly saturated, in some way, in an all out attempt for “arty, contemporary off the wall images and sequences”. . We see many shots of Sasha in deep contemplation, with all this burden on her mind, as she sees young children with their mothers, as she faces up to this enormous dilemma, which will change the path of her life. Her pain is also compounded by the fact that her lover of this solitary night (we never get to see in the flesh this handsome creature) is attracted to the other sex and for some reason which I could not fathom, she resides in San Francisco with one of his gay lovers Boshen (played by Brian Danforth). Her relationship with Boshen is many degrees colder than frosty and in fact at times Sasha can be guarded, acerbic and unrepentantly hostile, in the same way a wild female cat might protect it’s offspring. Even when Boshen’s friends are trying to be simply amicable, she spits venom.

For some this film might niggle, unnerve and they might be tempted to head towards the exit door, long before its conclusion. The film flips languages, from Chinese to English and vice versa at random, it is often confusing and disorientating like the camera work. There is at times this gritty realism and lack of hope that prevails, like a toxic cloud above a city. At the end there is no resolution, just a figurative long drawn out image, as the climatic scene, when maybe we could have hoped for more and a lot more depth throughout. When you leave the cinema, you might just think to yourself, what was that all about?

Francis H. Powell is originally from England and moved to Paris in 1999. In addition to being a writer (articles, songs and poems), he is a painter, DJ and English trainer. For more information, please click here to read his complete bio.

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