Given
the proliferation of security cameras, Mainland Chinese increasingly live in
public. However, it is hard for them to object when they willing trade away so
much privacy through web-cams and social media. Installation artist Xu Bing
tells a modern fable exclusively through cobbled-together excerpts of CCTV
footage and cloud-stored internet video in Dragonfly
Eyes (trailer
here), which screens as a Projections selection
of the 55th New York Film Festival.
Ting
Qing (“Dragonfly”) has lived a sheltered existence in a Buddhist monastery, but
she is restless to see some of big city life. Will she ever. Repeatedly told
she is plain, the unskilled young woman accepts a series of menial jobs. At a
large dairy farm, she turns the head of a Ke Fan, a skilled worker with anger
management issues. He will follow her from city to city and job to job, lashing
out whenever he feels she has been mistreated.
Eventually,
this lands Ke Fan in prison and Ting Qing in need of another fresh start. She
gets a crack at it, thanks to plastic surgery, obtained through her
before-and-after modeling. Suddenly, she finds creepy fame as an internet idol.
Unfortunately, the masses are fickle and the trolls will be cruel.
Frankly,
Dragonfly makes you wonder why the
Chinese government bothered to install so many cameras, when nobody makes an
effort to stop the various beatings and drownings they captured. If they aren’t
being watched, then what is the point?
In
fact, some of the edited footage is highly disturbing, almost in a Faces of Death kind of way. While some
of the most disastrous clips are used as metaphorical interstitial buffers, they
register just the same. For instance, Xu incorporates car accidents, suicides,
roof cave-ins, bridge collapses, train derailments, and an airliner falling out
of the sky. China never looked more dangerous than it does in Dragonfly, because it is all real.
Zhai
Yongming and Zhang Hanyi’s screenplay definitely leans towards the
melodramatic, but it takes a gender-bending left turn late in the third act
that is definitely gutsy for the Mainland. Their story might be sudsy, there is
something oddly compelling about Ting Qing and Ke Fan, two young people trying
to make it in the city, but finding the deck stacked against them. The
disembodied voices of Liu Yongfang and Su Shangqing that narrate the grainy
footage are weirdly compelling in a similar way.
Yet,
considering how it was assembled, it is rather surprising Dragonfly is more of an indictment of the corrosive madness of social
media than the invasiveness of the surveillance state. Either way, the film
clearly suggests a bit more privacy would be a good thing.
