Honggui Yao in Stonewalling (KimStim)

Stonewalling, directed by Ji Huang and Ryuji Otsuka, offers a rare, unrestrained glimpse into life in contemporary China through the perspective of an ordinary 20-year-old college student, Lynn (Honggui Yao). The film was shot by a three-person crew in China with no permits. Despite this guerrilla approach, every frame of the film has a distinct artistic quality. The lighting, the color, the mood are all top notch. The film depicts Lynn’s aimless, meandering drift through life, and the film mirrors that experience perfectly.

The film starts out strong, with a going away party for friends who are moving to London. Her boyfriend, Zhang (Liu Long), speaks flawless English (better than many Americans do), and the party is extremely bourgeois—straight out of something from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is catered and bursting with every delicacy that a foodie could want. (I wish this striking scene went on longer or that this milieu was explored further, because it is done so well here.)

Zhang is on the fast track to success, but Lynn is not on the same page at all. It makes you wonder what they have in common, if anything. He has been prodding her to take her English lessons more seriously. He views it as a key to getting ahead, but she hasn’t made any progress. She is trying to be a flight attendant, but even that seems too much for her. She understandably becomes more focused and consumed when she finds out she’s pregnant. However, Zhang advises that she should have an abortion because they are too young to have a baby—and besides, it would derail his ambitious life. It isn’t in his plans. So, Lynn tells him she had an abortion and goes away, returning to her hometown to live with her bickering and financially-strapped parents, plays by co-director Huang’s actual mother and father. One reason she doesn’t choose to get an abortion is that having a baby could potentially open up an economic opportunity for her.

The film is colorful and vibrant, but also haunting, filled with moments of quiet and loneliness. In the bustling city of Changsha (population: eight million), Lynn is alone. She comes from a lower-middle-class family. Her boyfriend is from a rich family. She brings the viewer into the uncertainty of navigating the bourgeois and her folks’ less well-off space. She has a chance to enter into a bourgeois enclave, via Zhang, but she doesn’t care to—but she also doesn’t seem too eager to follow in her parents’ footsteps. She is caught between the two worlds and doesn’t engage with either of them.

Lynn spends a lot of time passively, floating through the city as a silent figure. Her affect is flat. The contrast between her dour moping and the brightly lit stores and cityscapes of modern China is notable. Lynn has brief encounters with different characters who offer opportunities at sporadic employment. Many are eager to give her a chance because she is beautiful (this is remarked upon extensively by one of her employers). She just kind of goes along to get along, offering the bare minimum needed at the various gigs, like selling lotions and creams at a convention. She is trained fast and then put to work immediately, but her heart is never really in any of the gigs.

An epic length, two-and-a-half-hours-long saunter through the life of an ordinary Zoomer, Stonewalling beautifully reveals through its twists and turns the struggle to find one’s direction.