“Dreamlike”, “transitory”, “driftily disjointed” – reviewers have used these terms fittingly to describe Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s debut feature, The Cloud in Her Room (2020), which follows Muzi (Jin Jing), an aimless 22-year-old university graduate returning to her hometown of Hangzhou, China, whose landscape has changed almost beyond recognition. Dialogue and narrative take a back seat to Zheng’s wistful investigation of mood in this black-and-white film, which pastes together scenes from ordinary domestic life (such as families eating and sleeping together) and long, exacting shots exploring intimacy between characters and its inevitable dissipation. In between, dream-like sequences are inverted in infrared. The effect of A Cloud’s depiction of alienation, loneliness, and longing in contemporary city life is uncanny and almost fantastical. This seems to be what Zheng desired; in interviews, the filmmaker has expressly guarded against interpretation in favour of sensory experience, saying: “I don’t have a strong message to deliver. But I have a moment to share.”
Zheng’s “moment”, inspired by her own memories growing up in Hangzhou, is in fact a sprawling series of moments. And in the same way that Muzi roams around her hometown, the film shows her life unfurling with no apparent narrative logic. Spectral scenes inside an empty apartment in the same sprawling block of high-rises where Muzi spent her childhood bookend an otherwise fluid narrative. In the film’s opening shot, a woman reminisces in a talking-head-style interview about an abandoned “nineties-style Hong Kong” childhood apartment. (She then disappears for much of the film; The Cloud is interested in exploring how people can be connected to one another by threads invisible to themselves.) The scene cuts to Muzi, alone, as she moves around her former childhood flat, now abandoned. She opens a window and it falls off its rusty hinges, dropping into the empty garden storeys below. Since graduating from university, Muzi has returned to the city – then, and still, rapidly modernising in preparation to host the 2022 Asian Games – with no apparent job and few friends. Her parents, meanwhile, have both moved elsewhere in Hangzhou. Her father, a former visual artist turned musician, now lives with a younger wife with whom he shares a child; her mother has on-off romances with foreigners and a tender relationship with her daughter, who accompanies her to drunken karaoke sessions and meals out. And so the old apartment becomes a place of escape, reprieve, and renewed discovery: a physical reminder that she once had a grounded, rooted past, no matter how remote it may now seem.
Muzi is not alone in her rootlessness. Her family and few friends may not be as obviously displaced, but they too have been carried into a new and disorienting era of globalisation and they come across as drifters for whom anything as solid as direct confrontation would be too much. They leave much unspoken, gently circling around each other despite the ostensible closeness that family and romance demands in name (though often not in practice.) Muzi’s father may be cheating on his new wife with a student; his wife, in turn, has not told their daughter, Niu, that Muzi is her half-sister. Her laconic mother is dissatisfied with her romantic life, while Muzi and her boyfriend, the photographer Fei, are in an ambiguous relationship that eludes commitment (“I was in love once,” he tells her, “five years ago… I think once is enough.”) Intimacy is the repellent pole pushing the characters apart. In another film, these misfires and untold confessions might form the basis for dramatic release and reconciliation – or be used as fodder for a moralistic statement on the soul-destroying nature of modern urban life. In Zheng’s vision, these feelings just hang in the air, much like the roiling smoke emitted by its cigarette-loving characters (the act of sharing a light constitutes some of the most tender scenes in the film) and the mist that hangs over Hangzhou, a metropolis that is, like so many others in China, permanently in flux.
Likewise, the way The Cloud has been shot and edited prevents any grand moments of deliverance not only in content, but also in form. In one lengthy scene, Fei and Muzi try and fail to hail a cab in the dark while discussing where to eat. The camera then pans to the occluded sky and Muzi is heard confessing “A few days ago, I met someone”. Fade back to the street: the couple is gone. Zheng enjoys dwelling on the silent, awkward tedium of life; whenever a character utters a revelation, the shot cuts away. These set-ups track with a growing body of criticism in the West looking at emotional ambiguity and distance within the work of Asian diasporic artists. Summer Kim Lee, writing about the “Asian American asociality” of the singer Mitski and the poet Ocean Vuong, configures the “assimilated yet socially isolated, unrelatable” Asian subject as “playful, caring experimentations” that “critique the contemporary liberal mandate for minoritarian subjects to be visible and legible.” Nan Z Da argues that the refusal to “disambiguate” offers Chinese diasporic writers a certain freedom both from the Western gaze (which will be quick to put your pain through the flattening framework of “tiger mother trauma”) and the burden of wide-ranging political trauma. Such interpretations have arisen as diasporic Asian artists have gained more mainstream currency in the West, and they have also amplified debates about the limitations of representation and visibility as proxies for emancipation. Interestingly, for these critics, avoidance is rendered not so much as a negative move away from something solid, but as something productive, constitutive of a new paradigm in and of itself.
Zheng studied in Los Angeles and now lives in Hangzhou. Though The Cloud deals with the particularity of living in contemporary China, it similarly plays with ambiguity and withholding in its exploration of loneliness, which is in itself a transnational phenomenon. Her films thus are not part of the wave of recent diasporic work taken up by these critics but there’s a comparable sense of discovery to be found in her use of ostensible “avoidance”. Modern alienation, particularly as it relates to city-dwelling young people, has become somewhat of an an overburdened subject in recent years. What feels fresh and welcome in The Cloud is that it seeks no deliverance in the obvious or the institutional, nor does it rattle against the pervasive feeling of loneliness and lack of apparent meaning by then making an anxious psyche the centre of its filmic universe.1 We are asked to – made to – take our own analytical egos out of it, and put in their place a full-hearted commitment to sensory experience and feeling. Like in a counselling session, or a crucial principle in emotional maturity, we sit with the feeling rather than run from it.
In the end, the only entity to which Muzi and all of The Cloud’s characters have to confront with honesty is the camera. If Zheng is committed to a certain ambiguity in content, playfully mixing together dreamscapes with narrative, disrupting chronology and cause and effect in the edit, she has a straightforward relationship to the means by which this is done. Filmmaking, and the moving image, Zheng believes, offer us access to a truth that cannot be satisfied by literature or photography. “When someone walks into a film”, she told Asian Movie Pulse, “he/she can be intrigued by the image, the sound or just a look of the character in a random scene. Sometimes cinema evokes certain feelings and memories that have been forgotten or hidden for a long time.” In The Cloud, characters are also given the tool of the camera, which they turn on themselves and others. Muzi uses an iPhone to touch up her makeup before singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at her local bar; we watch her watching herself. Zheng makes use of a variety of filming techniques, assembling a patchwork of interviews, documentary footage and inverted images with the aim of conveying “different aspects of reality”. (She chose to grade the film in greyscale because of the historical convention of using it for flashbacks and dreams; that she sets her entire film in greyscale challenges what we take to be “reality” in the world of the film, as well as an expansion of its definition, more broadly.)2 The perverse voyeurism of filmmaking, and film watching, is explored in another scene in which Muzi puts her weary father in front of the camera, asking him probing questions about the state of his current relationship with his wife, why he gave up drawing, and his relationship with her mother. The camera, close up on his face, lingers on his eyes, which look distant until he turns to her and fixes them back: “After all these years”, he asks “have you ever blamed us?” The camera cuts away again, to another scene. It is here, more than anywhere, that I wished it had lingered. Isolation can only communicate so much, though such is our condition.
1 In her review of a series of recent “millennial memoirs” for the London Review of Books, Maggie Doherty observes that as disparate and wide-ranging as these books are, just about all seem to find meaning in institutions, normative standards, and thirst for the safe, warm glow offered by prestigious universities and lusted-after workplaces. (A reflection more of, I think, the type of young person with both the precocious drive and access to publish widely-read books, than any statement on “millennials” per se.) A true freedom, it appears to me, might involve casting off the notion of life as a perennially nervous appeal for recognition from a higher authority (no longer God in this schematic, but rather Harvard/your boss/the London Review of Books). Recognise standards and institutions for the false idols that they are, and see that conventional success is not only stupid, but that it also will not save you. Set fire to your pedigrees; cast off the mental yoke of achievement; throw your work phone in the river. We have nothing to lose but ourselves!
2 “If people see something, it really happened, no matter what category you put it in.” In “Interview with Zheng Lu Xinyuan”, Asian Movie Pulse.
