PERFECT LIFE (WAMMEI SHENHUO) Homage to Xstream

Emily Tang’s second film confirms what was already striking in her debut, CONJUGATION (2001): a gift for combining minute, mundane details to suggest a larger story (in this case, a tale of globalization, internal exile and loss) She interweaves the fates of two young women who never meet, except briefly in a street market in the New Economic Zone of Shenzhen. Barri in the dreary northeastern town of Fushun, Li Yueying is one of these 600 million Chinese women whose lives apparently do not matter. She’s uneducated, unskilled and repressed-but, in her burning desire for change, she hops on trains, switches jobs and tempts fate. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Jenny experiences the collapse of her dreams as her marriage to a local man is ending in divorce and financial hardship. One woman will move south, the other north. Is Shenzhen the city of broken dreams or mysterious survival? Switching to documentary made, Tang shoots assembly lines of young female workers in toy factories, sometimes capturing a defiant smile amidst the boredom and fatigue. Composing an intimate and complex picture of the female condition in China, PERFECT LIFE reasserts Tang as an original, insightful and highly talented director.