Stonewalling: an admirable but overly austere portrait of female anguish

• Reviewed from the 2022 London Film Festival.

Stonewalling is a cryptic title for Huang Ji and Otsuka Ryuji’s latest film, the third in their impressive, quietly punishing trilogy about marginalised women in contemporary China. In the film’s first act, college student Lynn discovers she’s pregnant, and chooses to give the baby to a family who – through the medical negligence of Lynn’s own mother – lost their own. If the title means to refuse, to hinder, to evade, the movie itself is about the opposite impulses: negotiation and compromise, played out through the fraught vessel of women’s bodies.

Female anguish – in particular, the nightmarish toll of unwanted pregnancy – provides the firepower behind the trilogy, which features actor Yao Honggui as recurring iterations of the Chinese everywoman. Egg and Stone (2012, shot by Otsuka but directed by Huang) and The Foolish Bird (2017, co-directed by both) dramatised the stifling conditions of rural life; Stonewalling transposes the Yao character to the hustling city of Changsha, where she peddles products in a saleswoman gig, tries to donate her eggs to wealthy clients, and, in a smart comic turn, watches her eccentric mother get sucked into a pyramid scheme selling ‘Vital Cream’. The baby-as-compensation is only one of the many transactions that govern the film’s narrative, which ultimately coheres into a drama of such naturalism that it begins to feel more like a testimony.

The style of Huang and Otsuka, who are husband and wife, is typically marked by a stripped-back economy of form, with scenes cinched to their essential parts and blocked with a careful visual geometry. It reliably finds its way into Stonewalling: Lynn is held at an ambivalent middle-distance in lengthy, static shots that meticulously track her movements, while the score is kept to a minimum. However, for all that Stonewalling is evidence of the directorial duo’s consummate filmmaking, it’s hard not to hope for a spasm of formal mischief or indulgence to break up the film’s abiding rigour – for the odd image to feel an inch more expansive and a twinge less cultivated. Stonewalling embodies the detached alienation of films by the heavy hitters in Chinese arthouse, from Jia Zhangke’s filmography to the more recent success of Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room (2020), but fails to invite the curiosity of the viewer with the same visual dynamism or élan.

The result is a slight stonewalling of the audience: an evasion of the cinematic qualities that truly arrest and captivate. If Huang and Otsuka’s commitment to their style is admirable, Stonewalling reveals that it can also be a straitjacket.