The Good Woman of Sichuan I 四川好女人
A young woman goes on an anonymous journey to her late husband's hometown Leshan in Sichuan province. There, she meets an old friend, a local theatre actress preparing for an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan. Ghosted by Shen Te the protagonist of the play, the actress loses the self at the intersection of fiction and reality. Unprepared, the filmmaker loses control of her camera. Together, they drift into a polyrhythmic experience of stasis.
一名年轻女子前往已故丈夫的家乡四川乐山。在那里，她遇到了一位老朋友，一位当地戏剧演员，她正在准备改编贝托特·布莱希特的戏剧《四川好人》。在陌生的家乡，旅行的女人与虚幻相遇。女演员似是被戏剧中的女主角沈德附身，在虚构与现实的交汇中迷失了自我。电影人猝不及防地失去了对摄影机的控制，她们一起陷入了一种交错的停滞。(translated by Mulan International Film Festival)
2021 / 87 min / Canada, China / Mandarin and Sichuan Dialects / 1.33:1
Cinematography by Sherry Wu
Music by Kits Shpira
Performance by Weihang He, Qingyang Wang, Sherry Wu, Sabrina Zhao
Directed, Edited, and Sound Design by Sabrina Zhao
“We don’t see the woman on the train moving through Sichuan, just the trees, rivers, lakes and houses passing by the window, vanishing behind the blur of vegetation, segmented by the tunnels. Perhaps she’s one of the two women we later observe in Leshan, by the river, at the hairdresser, buying clothes, sleeping on the window sill, although the restricted framings mean the city is more heard than seen. Of the women we hear in voiceover, one is an actress, she talks about the play she’s working on, an abstract, fluid staging of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Szechwan” being put on by a female director that’s also set in Leshan. What’s fluidity anyway? If it weren’t for the intertitle saying this isn’t an adaptation, the actress could be talking about this film too, it shares those qualities as well as others from the play. The shifts here aren’t from woman to man, but between modes, formats and registers, like thoughts that scatter on waking, from stasis to movement, high definition to grain, words to wordlessness, noise to silence, fiction to documentary; the camera is reflected in the window of the train. Any resemblance to the imagined or the dreamed is entirely coincidental.” (James Lattimer)