Director: Zhenyu Du
Writer: Zhenyu Du
Cast: Menghao Li & Yupeng Deng
While homosexual relationships in China are legal, they do not have the same protections afforded to heterosexual couples – from being able to get married and adopt, to basic legal protections. Indeed, while there is no law prohibiting homosexuality, there is also no law preventing workplace discrimination on those grounds.
With China’s faux-communist ruling party have long learned that sometimes the market is the simplest and most effective way of enforcing policy, it cannot be an accident that coming out in the country could legally see you lose the right to sell your labour, put food on the table, and keep a roof over your head.
Along with strictly enforced social norms (which seem to have coincidentally become increasingly prevalent after the intervention of Western imperialist powers in the 1800s) this is an environment in which people are pushed to police themselves – to deny an inescapable part of their existence for the whole of their lives. And in a world in which the steady grind of late capitalism is leaving everyone more alienated than ever before – even when they live in cities bigger than any in human history – that is an especially cruel enforcement of human distance.
Someone Around manages to touch on all of these themes, albeit through vaguery and double-entendres, in a bittersweet rumination on secret identities during the Covid-19 lockdown in Beijing. It is the latest in a long line of films sent to Indy Film Library from China, navigating a minefield of bureaucracy and unofficial censorship to try and pass comment about the country’s increasingly silenced LGBT+ community. And perhaps, it is the finest.
The story follows student Cheng Yu (the brilliant Menghao Li, who grows beyond his initial timidness to be the emotional core of the film) and young artist Yang Shu (Yupeng Deng, who might initially seem the ‘stronger’ of the pair, but is steadily shown to be terrified of what the rest of the world thinks of him). The pair attempt to navigate a powder keg of anxieties and emotions, while trapped in their shared tower-block apartment, as the pandemic rages below.
From the beginning, the pair make for awkward company; neither seems capable of looking the other in the eye while discussing their hopes and fears – but as things unfold, it becomes more apparent that they are afraid of addressing something about themselves; and under lockdown, they are no longer have the luxury of escaping those feelings by going out.
Early on in the lockdown, Cheng Yu has planned a movie night – having bought a projector and a small screen to turn the space into a tiny cinema – and the pair settle in to watch a horror. Again, both are dancing around the event, unwilling or unable to directly admit what it means – but it is a ritual many viewers may recognise from their early dating lives. Unfortunately, Yang Shu falls asleep during the movie, so nothing comes of it – but a dejected Cheng Yu drapes a small blanket over his sleeping companion, before falling asleep himself.
The interplay by the pair moves at an excruciating crawl at times – pacing which might put a few viewers of, but I would argue is entirely appropriate during the limbo of lockdown; and for which the nerve of director Zhenyu Du deserves commendation. At the same time, it gives plenty of time and space for the still-life imagery of DOP Yuegeng Shan to shine. In this stasis, the apartment becomes both people’s world, and finding different ways to shoot the space to exemplify that is some really great work, giving us beautiful visual contrast to underline some key dramatic moments.
Over the coming weeks, the two housemates continue an extremely distant will-they-won’t-they; central moments including the tender application of a band aid to a wounded finger, and talk of having shared a bed with other boys at boarding school. Following this discussion, the pair share a bed for one final night, before the lifting of the lockdown – and they hear a jangling of wind-chimes from the next room. It’s a sound which Cheng Yu recalls being taught by his mother as signifying the onset of an earthquake.
The fact that the chimes sound at this particular moment suggests while there might not be a literal earthquake at the moment, something very real is shaking the world of both protagonists. It’s something which makes Yang Shu’s reply decidedly devastating; noting, “There are hardly any earthquakes in Beijing”. The moment passes.
After weeks of being bottled up, the lifting of lockdown finally gives the mounting pressure an escape. Both individuals are now ‘free’ to return to their distant lives: a cruel irony having seen the pair less isolated during a pandemic – closer to intimacy than ever before, during an event during which many other people complained of feeling ‘alienated’ from one another. And they may well be more alone at the point where the rest of society comes back into touching distance.
But while this is inescapably a sad place to leave our characters, I am not sure that this is a purely “presenting a pessimistic view of intimacy in contemporary society”, as the director’s statement would have it. It feels more ambiguous to me. Certainly, the cards are stacked against him, but as Cheng Yu sits contemplating what the future holds in his grey and now empty apartment, the distant clanging of chimes sounds again. He has not moved beyond his ‘earthquake’, he is not back in his box – and maybe that means there is hope for a life beyond this, where he finds a way to live as he truly is, and enjoy intimacy once more.
Zhenyu Du’s story is a masterclass in subtlety. There is a melancholic edge to it, playing with the tragic ideological handicap which means that two adults still feel they cannot make themselves available to each other, or their own desires, even while trapped in the same invisible space. But there is also a righteous refusal to fully commit to this being an unchallengeable ‘reality’, with the suggestion that Cheng Yu – and those like him trapped in their own world of silence – might still move beyond this. Having more than delivered on those promises with the execution of his script, Zhenyu Du deserves his film to be seen as widely as possible – at home and overseas.