Non-spaces and the liminal at the fore of Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger.
Often shuttling between his native China and a newly established home base in Chicago, the director Zhengfan Yang found himself spending an inordinate amount of time within the sterile confines of hotel rooms and airport lounges in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The experience struck him as something both alienating yet universal – a poignant embodiment of our contemporary age and its relentless cultivation of anomie. Yang expounded on this revelation and its creative implications at a New Directors/New Films screening of his latest film, Stranger – a piece he considers to be the culmination of the manifold hours spent in the rootless ether of travel and its accompanying spaces. A work of great formal and thematic ambition, the KVIFF Grand Prix winner aims to portray China’s political, social, and economic reality with an oblique and deeply existential touch.
If we’re to allow ourselves the vulgar indulgence of comparison, many will likely note that Yang’s meditative gaze appeals to the likes of Akerman and Costa, with its measured immersion and long, unyielding takes. But where their visual signatures found poetic evocation in a gritty naturalism and fictive realism, Yang explores the uncanny texture of modernity through the hyper-real, and at times even the surreal. Spanning seven vignettes, Stranger commands these distinct tonal rhythms to combine personal ideas of space and time with the rugged, and sometimes subtle, injustices of modern China. A hotel worker seeks refuge in an empty room, two men become subjects of a police raid, a woman livestreams during the pandemic, and a street performer prepares to head to work. Often marked by an unalloyed simplicity, each story is imbued with a contemplative depth that feels at times rigorous and hard-won, at others empty and grasping. But Yang finds greatest form, unsurprisingly, where ambiguity and liminality run deep – deploying movement, space, and time to express most profoundly what his philosophical exhortations at other times cannot.
That the film chooses French anthropologist Marc Auge’s “non-places” as cinematic ground for these themes reveals a subtext that is totalizing yet somehow, against the backdrop of an offscreen reality, equally restrained. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation brought popular attention to Auge’s anthropological work, mining “non-places” (a phenomenon of “supermodernity,” inorganic and self-contained in its relation to human social experience) for their romantic and emancipatory potential. More than twenty years on, as hyperglobalization continues apace in our post-COVID world, Yang’s apprehension of the liminal non-place feels more incisive in its clinical approach, a recombinatory exploration of Coppola’s melancholy punctuated by the solitary gut-punch of modernity. What was once considered charming, foreign eccentricity in Japan’s morass of glowing urban anonymity is now fundamentally familiar to contemporary China and Western cities alike, sans romantic valence. Stranger seems to grasp this shift and its foreboding implications in a way that will likely give it cultural and cinematic purchase for years if not decades to come. If anything is liberating in this re-examination of the urban “non-space,” it is decidedly Yang’s fastidious preoccupation with space and its natural rhythms. Four walls may suggest fetters, but for the Chinese director, they are the ultimate stage for the exploration of the human condition, offering a crystalline view of how we relate to the confines we inhabit. Here we find something transcendent, the beautiful storm of the human soul in stark relief, wending its way through breaths of motion like a ritual incantation.
