'Queens of the Qing Dynasty' Review: A Rich Story of Friendship [TIFF]

Ashley McKenzie, the Nova Scotia-based director of the elliptical and scarifyingly intimate methadone-addiction drama “Werewolf,” returns with another tale of codependence and the Canadian welfare state. Talking to Film Comment in 2018, McKenzie copped to a desire “to have more extensive scenes and more elaborate choreography and staging” in future projects and hinted at her then-gestating second feature. “The elevator pitch would probably say ‘Certain Women’ meets Alan Clarke BBC portrait dramas,” she said.

And so it is: “Queens of the Qing Dynasty,” about a neurodivergent teenager hospitalized following a(nother) suicide attempt, and the genderqueer Chinese-immigrant advocate she bonds with during her recovery, is at once rigorously intimate and richly symbolic. Though it can feel long at two hours and forced in its metaphors, it’s a successfully upscaled project showing McKenzie as an artist sketching expansive scenes on the canvas of her native Cape Breton.

The film opens in the Unama’ki hospital, where Star (Sarah Walker), pupils enormous, dazedly drinks activated charcoal to counteract the toxic cocktail she’s evidently swallowed. McKenzie films in slightly fisheye wide-angle close-ups and lets the pacing drag in the early scenes, creating an intense, narrow, distorted focus. Shots blink in and out, and the electronic score by Yu Su and Cecile Believe bubbles underneath.

With Star’s tranquilized affections and halting ungrammatical inflections (which carry over to her text messages), it’s easy to miss that she’s capable of being quite witty, with self-aware humor submerged in a fugue of diagnoses and prescriptions. For the first hour of the film—neatly, its first half almost exactly—she is confined to the hospital. There are nurses, doctors, and other carers, but seemingly no other patients, suggestive of a subjective odyssey. Evidently a hospital regular, Star compliments everyone she meets and often films her surroundings on a cracked smartphone, her way of forcing and demonstrating an engagement with the world outside of her head, despite a style of filmmaking that emphasizes her struggles to, literally, zoom out and get a handle on the wider context of her life.

McKenzie’s often-disorienting edits, which cut around conventional establishing shots and exposition, similarly convey Star’s worrying lack of control and agency. Almost 19 years old, she’s about to age out of juvenile care, with the specter of adult mental institutions lurking. As a result, she struggles with the tests set up to gauge her ability to live independently. A glowing electric coil, meant to simulate a stove, glows hazily red. She’d burn her house down.

McKenzie started developing the project around the character of Star, whose struggles with mental equilibrium and wry behind-the-beat cadences were inspired by a local acquaintance. However, the film took on a different shape when McKenzie met Ziyin Zheng, a Shanghaiese immigrant who had relocated to this remote part of Nova Scotia to find a queer community. Zheng told McKenzie they needed “a platform to express myself,” so McKenzie created the character of An, Star’s volunteer patient advocate. They are introduced in the film singing a song of longing and dependence from Chinese opera, gesturing luxuriantly with their beckoning, liquid fingers, their nails having grown as long as the nails of empresses and concubines in the Qing Dynasty.

Fingernails and manicures, An’s and Star’s, are a recurrent image in “Queens of the Qing Dynasty.” Ancient Chinese noblewomen, An explains to Star, would “extend their empire by keeping their nails long,” a symbol of their exalted status above manual labor. Gazing at the babies in the hospital’s maternity ward, Star muses about how nice it would be to be swaddled. An—whose lover, in another scene, wraps them up tightly in a robe—jokes about their wish to be a “trophy wife.” Stumbling through healthcare and immigration bureaucracies and coping with the traumas of abandonment and exile, Star and An form a radical bond in recognition of their shared need to be cared for.

McKenzie and cinematographer Scott Moore’s scrutiny of naturalistic and amateur performers keeps this from being a sentimental film. Sarah Walker is great in an unself-conscious way, foggily conveying Star’s blinking on-off struggle to bridge the gap between her inner monologue and the outer world. She speaks in a thick voice that sounds effortful and takes in the world with watchful, silent eyes. It’s the rare performance that’s magnetic in its passivity.

Nevertheless, insistent poetic motifs arise in moments of lyricism that seem schematic, as in a VR sequence that allows An and Star’s avatars to fly freely through a fantasy world. This is screenwriterly in a way that “Werewolf” never had to grasp for; such moments, along with palette-widening flourishes like the use of original animation, are maybe unnecessary given the depth of McKenzie’s self-contained worlds.

A running joke of Star’s, which An soon catches on to, is that she’s “evil” (like the “diabolical” scheming-bitch queens of the Qing Dynasty). This is guilt over being unfit or deviant, redirected and reclaimed into an inside joke and transformed in meaning simply by virtue of now being shared. Their banter—private and at the far margins of their society’s perspective—about wanting to be “spoiled” is a proudly self-deprecating riff on the tenderness they can finally admit they deserve. [B]

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