Director: Keyan Miao
Writer: Keyan Miao
Cast: Chantal Li, Xuewei Li
Running time: 15mins
Director: Keyan Miao
Writer: Keyan Miao
Cast: Chantal Li, Xuewei Li
Running time: 15mins
It’s been four years since Indy Film Library reviewed Keyan Miao’s film Touch of Freedom. Out of the blue, we have been privileged with a second short from this extraordinary imagination: Orchid Fairy.
This is a very different film in terms of setting and tone – but while the shift in tone makes for an intriguing watch, there are also welcome commonalities which mark it out distinctively as a Keyan Miao film.
In Touch of Freedom, the filmmaker crafted a fantastical story, set in China’s ancient Song Dynasty – which developed a striking mythological skeleton to hang a thought-provoking critique of modern social attitudes in and out of China. Orchid Fairy brings us into a vibrant environment, more recognisable in many ways – but still with arbitrary norms and expectations which mythology plays a key role in navigating.
Again, then, Miao places a kind of folk tale at the heart of things – as our protagonist Paphia (Chantal Li) attempts to navigate the bizarre and off-putting ideology of assorted men on the dating scene. Li’s performance is worth its weight in gold alone here – here wonderfully expressive face constantly hinting to the audience at the absurdity, obscenity, or boredom of each interaction – underlining why this might be. Like so many of the social relationships which humans have constructed, here we will need to guild the scenario with fantasy, to avoid slipping into depression or insanity.
Paphia’s own lore, explaining in playful and imaginative terms why every man she meets is either tedious or loathsome, sees her project her desire – and exasperation – onto the mythology surrounding the Paphiopedilum she is cultivating in her apartment. The flower has ties to ancient Greek tales of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. At the same time, it is sometimes known as a cry-baby orchid due to it weeping due from its head – while as an epiphyte, it can only live once it finds a stable home on another larger plant.
Director of photography Zheren Wu also deserves special credit here, for helping this mythology to come to life with some wonderful framing, which seems to imbue the plants depicted with movement and personality. At one point, a camera inside the Paphiopedilum shows the flower almost quivers with anticipation, as hands reach out to touch it. A Banyan tree towers above the characters, enveloping them in its protective space – but also intimidating them by offering them something almost too grand to live up to.
At the same time, the sound design of Yu-Hsin Lin gives the sequences which take place beyond the confines of reality a quirky, off-kilter quality – filled with bizarre vocal performances and ethereal chimes. And this is fantastic for helping to emphasise just how removed Paphia’s desires are from what has (so far) been made available to her. As she day-dreams, Paphia casts herself in her own take on an ancient fable (which she later explains during one of her doomed dates, is largely inspired by Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In particular, the idea of “returning tears” (还泪) forms an important foundation for Paphia’s emotional journey.)
The fantasy sequences find Paphia sitting in a smoke-filled liminal space, playing the role of a lovelorn spirit who fell to Earth as a flower. Watered by a kind attendant of a nearby palace, she falls for the person who, of course, is embodied by the one man she does not feel repelled by: Sylvan (Xuewei Li). Someone who takes an interest in her – and her interests – rather than either presenting as a blank space of indifference, or a one-track sex-pest.
Returning to the chaos of reality, as the story progresses, Sylvan reveals his own set of mythologies, developed to help him counteract the harshness of the world in his own way. And this more than anything seems to suggest to Paphia that the pair are kindred spirits – taking him to a botanical garden to explain that perhaps he is the kind of larger tree her proverbial Pahiopedilum can flourish with. The problem, however, is that he has severe hay fever.
Someone’s fantasies cannot hold in this scenario. And Miao’s deft touch as a writer and director means that the film’s ending enables us to read this either as a positive or a negative. Perhaps the fact Paphia feels ready to cast off her own fantasy is because she has rightly identified a scenario where she no longer needs it to make the isolation and alienation of everyday life bearable. But perhaps it also suggests a foreboding future, where she finds herself in a relationship – and facing a new set of strange and arbitrary rules and expectations – she has no mythological buffer to help her filter and face that reality.
Whatever the case, Miao has shown again a colourful, creative understanding of the fantastical balancing act at the heart of our daily lives – and used it to examine the sometimes contradictory, often frustrating, world of human relationships. And it feels wonderful to watch her flourish as a storyteller across two such distinct, intelligent short films.
