Vivian Qu’s new film, “Angels Wear White,” couldn’t come to us at a better or worse time, depending on your point of view. In last week and a half or so, torrents of reports about the deserved fall of movie mogul and sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein have spilled across the web; the mounting accusations against him forced The Weinstein Company to save face by firing him last Sunday. In the aftermath, we’re left to examine Hollywood’s long and sordid history of shielding predatory men from justice, which is apropos of Qu’s picture, a crime drama verging on neo-noir that focuses on the iniquities heaped on the victims of, and witnesses to, a shocking sexual violation in a seaside resort town in China.
If the leap from Hollywood to Xiamen sounds too great to make without propulsive assistance, consider Qu’s opening image: Sightseers and beachgoers dawdling around a towering statue of Marilyn Monroe in full-on “The Seven Year Itch” mode. The iconography isn’t accidental, though its significance to current events is; here, Marilyn symbolizes feminine degradation, not the least because her pose invites captivated passersby to aim their cameras up her skirt. It’s at first a curiosity that one such passerby is a woman, Mia (Wen Qi), an undocumented migrant who cleans rooms at a rundown love motel. Later, Mia impulsively films a CCTV recording of an assault on two underage girls staying at the motel, Wen (Zhou Meijun) and Xin (Zhang Xinyue), and the curiosity dissipates. Maybe she’s just in the habit of documenting examples of women objectified by male actors.
Regardless, Wen and Xin’s ordeal splinters “Angels Wear White” into a triplicate narrative; one plot thread follows the girls as they’re both bullied by the law and sold out by their own parents, another follows Hao (Ke Shi), the lawyer appointed to the girls’ case, and of course Mia, whose status so profoundly hounds her that she’s unable to share evidence of the crime and help arrest the man responsible, a high-ranking commissioner in Xiamen. As the attorney, Hao has it easy, but the hoops she has to jump through just to secure a warrant feel like the sharpest edge of Qu’s critique: the social factors that protect men like the commissioner from spending a day in court far outweigh the avenues for legal recourse that are available to the people they harm.
There’s something Sisyphean about the joint attempts of Qu’s female characters at building the case against the girls’ attacker; the closer they get to rolling that boulder to the top of the hill, the more likely they are to slip and end up at the bottom. By the time “Angels Wear White” ends, the very idea of getting behind their burden again, to push to no avail, feels like a sick cosmic joke, a middle finger raised to mock the struggle for gender equality in our systems and institutions. Qu maintains impressive calm in her filmmaking in spite of Mia, Wen, and Xin’s maltreatment; that she never articulates her outrage is miraculous, though you can imagine that behind the camera, she’s seething. Why wouldn’t she? “Angels Wear White” is infuriating down to its core.
State censors noticed as much, obviously; the film failed to meet their standards of appropriate artistic conduct before competing at this year’s Venice Film Festival. But this, in so many ways, validates the strength of Qu’s protests while dovetailing with the movie’s criticism of male-led power structures muting women’s voices while neglecting their traumas. “Angels Wear White” is all about men conspiring to shut women up: by bribing them, by intimidating them, or by using force when all other means of persuasion fail. Xin’s mother and father are plied by gifts of iPhones and money, which they attempt to pass down to Wen’s dad (Geng Le), who, alone in the film’s coterie of unscrupulous men, finds the notion repellent. Not that Qu means to placate the “not all men” crowd, of course; one guy out of dozens doesn’t represent good odds for dudes in need of self-soothing.
In fact, one of Qu’s most damning sequences hinges on Wen and her mother, (Liu Weiwei), who slaps Wen across the face, rips her daughter’s clothes off their hangers, and then chops off the poor child’s hair, operating under the sexist bromide that it’s the woman’s fault when she’s accosted by a man. She shouldn’t have styled her hair that way. She shouldn’t have worn a dress like that. The transference of guilt from mom to Wen is agonizing. As Qu demonstrates through the relationship Mia’s coworker has with her tough guy boyfriend, the blame ever rests upon the shoulders of the transgressor, not the transgressed; as she demonstrates through her plot, it’s all too easy to convince authority otherwise.
Qu’s craft here is remarkably empathetic. Her camerawork, courtesy of cinematographer Benoit Dervaux, is deft, unobtrusive, and personal to the point of heartache; their aesthetic organically underlines the crushing realization that her protagonists, and women like them, are routinely overlooked by the society they live in. At best, they’re brushed off, or rejected. At worst they’re put in harm’s way through apathy. If you only pay attention to its tranquil presentation, you might miss the blistering commentary “Angels Wear White” doles out on the built-in sexism of patriarchal cultures. The film looks heavenly, often bathed in light, as if Qu wants nothing more than to assuage these women of their suffering by suggesting paradise. But the brightness is just a veneer. Beneath the surface, “Angels Wear White” is as bleak as they come. [B+]
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