Nina Wu (2021)

Direction: Midi Z
Country: Taiwan

This finely crafted, ever restless psychodrama film co-written by Midi Z (The Road to Mandalay, 2016) and Wu Ke-xi, who also stars, provides an absorbing cinematic experience that gets creepier and infuriating as the details of the story emerge. 

Sufen Wu (Ke-xi) left her rural hometown eight years ago to try her luck as an actress in Taipei, where she adopted the artistic name Nina Wu. She was only picked to play background roles in a few short films and minor commercials, and has been making most of her living as an online celebrity. Now, that an opportunity to have the leading role in a major feature came up, Nina doesn’t want to screw up and goes for it, even if the nudity and sex scenes in it make her extremely uncomfortable. How much humiliation and submission is needed for an actress to be successful?

The film-inside-the-film concept works well, and we find her being provoked and bullied by the strict director (Shih Ming-shuai). We also learn through episodic scenes that Nina misses her childhood friend Kiki (Vivian Sung) most than anyone, and that she deals with different problems in her family. Her recurrent strange dreams show her state of mind, which is deeply affected trauma.

The film is cleverly structured and the title character shaped with feverish, Darren Aronofsky-like layers, which adds well to the suspenseful coldness of Michael Haneke and the voluptuousness and paranoia associated with Gaspar Noé. It can be manipulative and disorienting at times, and not all scenes work at the same level. Still, it’s a chilling statement involving the movie industry that will leave you disturbed and disgusted.

The Road to Mandalay (2017)

Directed by Midi Z
Country: Myanmar / Taiwan

The acerbic art-house drama “The Road to Mandalay”, a Taiwan-Myanmar-France-Germany coproduction, depicts a story centered on the adversities of illegal immigration and comes embittered by an immoderate, destructive relationship.

Burmese filmmaker Midi Z directs from a tight script of his own authorship, returning to the fictional film after releasing two documentaries in the last couple of years about jade diggers in Myanmar, “Jade Miners” and “City of Jade”.

The long opening shot shows us a woman and a man crossing a riverside on a floatable rubber ring. She is Lianqing (Wu Ke-xi), 23, a Burmese from the water-less region of Lashio, and he is an escort paid to take her to Thailand, whose border is delimited by the other margin. From there, she proceeds to a van that will finally take her to Bangkok, where a friend should be waiting for her.
 
Unexpectedly, an unselfish young man from her hometown, Guo (Kai Ko), makes his expensive front seat available to her and jumps into the trunk. Once in Bangkok, he tries to persuade her to work with him in his cousin’s textile factory, an opportunity that eventually occurs after Lianqing realize that times have changed and no respectable company, small or big, will hire her without a work permit. 

Before starting to work in there, obviously off the books, she was washing dishes in a small restaurant but ended up arrested during an overnight police raid. It was Guo who bailed her out, yet Lianqing, unresponsive to his romantic advances, refuses to follow his ideas. Besides their clashing personalities, they want totally different things from life. While she’s willing to risk everything to get the papers that would allow her to work in the city and consequently apply for a Thai passport, he intends to return to Burma to open a small store to sell clothes imported from China.
It’s curious how this conflicting situation sometimes weighs more than the immigration problem itself.

Avoiding overdramatic strategies or major fusses, Midi Z resorts to a slow, steady pace to set the highly articulate storytelling in motion. It is bolstered by the inherent sadness of the score, magisterially composed by Lim Giong (a recurrent choice by Jia Zhangke and Hou-Hsiao Hsien), and the dispiriting visuals captured by the debutant cinematographer Tom Fan.

Bitterness and disappointment escalate as the desperate Lianqing considers a new tactic - remarkably insinuated through an intelligent surreal scene - in order to solve her problem.

When the tale seemed to get closer to a happy ending, a brutal final blow is applied, suspending our breath for a few seconds. The deliberate visual abruptness devised by another Zhangke’s regular, the editor Matthieu Laclau, only emphasizes the raw tones adopted throughout.

Both Wu Ke-xi and Kai Ko were phenomenal in their performances and Midi Z has probably in “Mandalay” his best work so far.