Conjugation

[Dongci bianwei, 2001]

Film

In her masterfully directed first feature film, Emily Tang (Tang Xiaobai), one of the few female directors of the Sixth Generation, draws a subtle yet harrowing picture of the despair that struck her generation after Tiananmen Square.

In the cold winter of 1989, Guo Song and Xiao Qing, a young couple who have met while demonstrating on the Square, sneak into empty buses to make love at night. Later, they move in together (illegally, for they’re not married) in a hovel they try to turn into a shelter against the outside world. Guo Song, a recent graduate, has been assigned a factory job. Xiao Qing, a student, moonlights in a ‘new-style’ cappuccino bar. When Guo Song gets drunk with his buddies, they talk about one of them, nicknamed ‘Foot Finger’, still ‘missing’, and they read aloud the poems he left behind—letters addressed to an imaginary ‘sister’:

Sister, sister! I am cold and lonely

Shrouded in darkness.

Conjugation’s elliptic structure is made of seemingly disconnected vignettes: the pathetic dance celebrating the upcoming Asian Olympic games that Guo Song and his co-workers are forced to perform; Xiao Qing’s joyless encounter with a businessman who takes her to a hotel; or Guo Song’s blank stare when the man drops her at their door. Keeping all violence off-screen, Tang focuses on small gestures, mundane situations, the fragile pursuit of personal happiness and the unbearable silence of repression, sometimes broken by a glimpse of hope.

BÉRÉNICE REYNAUD