The film at this year's festival I have most been looking forward to is Montreal, My Beautiful (writer/dir Xiaodan He), a Canadian drama starring Joan Chen as a Chinese immigrant who pushes at the boundaries of her life as a wife and mother.
The film starts with a comedic scene of Chen's Feng Xia attending a gyno consultation with her daughter who has to translate her mother's intimate health issues to the male doctor. This sense of comic awkwardness is not repeated during the rest of the film's 117-minute running order, but Feng does have a tense relationship with her daughter who is thoroughly at home in Montreal and chastises her mum for not speaking French. So Feng enrols on a course and through that comes to know a young Cuban immigrant who turns her on to online dating, as you do. We never see this character again.
Before you know it, Feng is online and pulling a younger woman called Lisa who invites her over for friends with benefits sex. It seems implausible that Feng would be rushed into this state, but the film drops these bombshells and then lingers on tiny details to create extended tableaux, like Feng sitting outside smoking, which she does often, gazing into space. It is a frustrating watch.
Eventually, we do learn a bit more about Lisa and Feng, but the drama that ensues becomes quite melodramatic and the film did not quite jell for me, as I found it a chilly watch. The daughter largely disappears from the story for long periods, leaving Feng to inhabit a joyless life with her husband, frustrated in his career and life. After a time, I was willing the film to come to some conclusion, but after a fiery confrontation between the spouses, it seemed to peter out into another unresolved ending. Chen is luminous, but the film does not really do her justice.
Of the shorts I have seen, I will mention Seek No Favor, a messy but ambitious tale of vigilantism and wig thievery set in NYC. Sunday Lunch is a well-done farce concerning a lesbian couple arriving at a family do with secrets to share. Nice Jewish Girl is an Aussie teen drama in which a girl at camp finds a porno mag which unleashes repressed desires.
Montreal, My Beautiful trailer
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