All Tomorrow’s Parties

Still active as a cinematographer, Yu Lik-Wai has finally completed his second feature as director. In the not-too-distant future Eastern Asia is ruled by the authoritarian Gui Dao sect, which engineers the society it wants by confining misfits to re-education camps. The Xie brothers, Xiaozhuai (played by Diao Yinan, who competes for a Tiger Award as director of Uniform) and Xiaomian (Zhao Weiwei, from Jia Zhang-ke’s Unknown Pleasures), are arrested and packed off to Camp Prosperity, where both of them meet potential partners for life. But nothing can come of the burgeoning relationships (Xiaozhuai with the Korean Xuelan, Xiaomian with the ailing Lanlan) until the day the camp commandant does a bunk, leaving the gates wide open. Evidently the sect has collapsed. Suddenly granted freedom, the inmates find themselves wondering what to do with it. Aside from its sardonic perception that people can be rudderless without strong rule, the film excels in constructing hallucinatory images of its post-apocalypse world, a dreamed environment which dwarfs its inhabitants. Yu has a knack of highlighting small, human details (such as a rediscovery of the pleasures of soap) which resonate with this macrocosm in surprising and haunting ways. There’s no question that the film carries more weight visually than it does philosophically, but those fleeting, tender moments are what make it count emotionally.