Knitting by Yin Lichuan

“Your feet are fat.” “Your cooking is awful.” “You have no brains.” Haili makes sure to point out to Daping her every personal flaw. Daping just wants to be with Chen Jin, a boy swept in any direction the wind blows and addicted to playing the lotto.

Knitting by writer, poet and now second-time director Yin Lichuan is a conflicted love triangle set against the backdrop of an enormous metropolis in contemporary China. Haili, an acquaintance of Chen Jin unknown to Daping, walks into their apartment one day and disrupts their delicate relationship. A silent, naive girl looking for confirmation of her own existence from others, Daping is finding out the hard way that she only has herself to rely on. Haili, slightly older and hardened through disappointment, has taught herself to survive by trampling on others to get to the finish first. Vying for the boy’s attention, the two women keep butting heads, too self-involved or scared to take a step back and look at the other as a companion instead of an adversary.

Intensely real close-ups are mixed with portraits of the city landscape. Everything far away looks impressive and beautiful, but everything close is either under construction or falling apart, reflecting the state of the characters’ relationships with one another. Then Chen Jin disappears, leaving a pregnant Daping to hit rock bottom, and it is Haili who is there to help her back on her feet. Both equally vulnerable, they discover that they have more to give each other than what they were looking to get from Chen Jin.

The film explores the core of female relationships : the envy of each other’s bodies, the slumbering competition when men are around, and the never-ending capacity for love. In the end, the two women realise that they are equals, not so different in strength and resourcefulness.

Maartje Alders