Mother and daughter go drinking, then stagger boozily up a flight of stairs they also attend a karaoke club, Mathieu Delvaux’s camera exploring the labyrinthine windings of its futuristic corridors, resembling a corny sci-fi movie set. Muzi’s most complex relationship, however, seems to be with her mother, who gets a number of moments to herself in the film-that Dutch lesson, and a dour moment with her Japanese guy, glumly taking turns to play that game of catching a wooden ball, bilboquet. She also spends time with her half-sister, seen at her school practicing some catwalk-like dance moves with her class, and with her dad, in conversations on a rain-swept rooftop, telling him off for being away too much at gigs, and not devoting enough time to Niu. Meanwhile, Muzi also takes a fancy to an older man (Dong Kangning), the weather-beaten, wolfish owner of a bar where she’s seen spending an occasional boozy evening at one point, she sings him an awkward, flirty “Happy Birthday,” Marilyn-style. But then comes the sudden shift, as the couple ride in the back of a cab afterwards, with Yu Fei sunk in moody tristesse (floppy-haired, arty, he does in fact wear his tristesse very fetchingly).
It’s a moment of ecstatic emotional release, followed by a marvelous scene of them lying on the bed together, lost in the dreamy languor of a post-coital afternoon, the sounds of the city buzzing outside the window. At one point, Muzi and her photographer boyfriend Yu Fei (Chen Zhou), with whom she’s not slept, go to the now empty apartment where she used to live with her parents the couple have a tender session of first-time sex, candidly and rapturously captured in a long take. The Cloud in Her Room is a film of fragments and brief incidents, and sudden, not always explicable changes-changes in both the film’s mood and the characters’. And her glamorous mother (Lui Dan), who sees Muzi very much as a peer and a drinking partner, is going out with a Japanese guy but later takes up with a younger Dutch boyfriend, Thomas (the scene where he teaches Muzi’s mum some basic Dutch is droll and tender, and of course doused in smoke). Her father (Ye Hongming), a former artist now making his living as a jazz drummer, has remarried and has a young daughter, Niu. In fact, we only see her again much later, while the heroine turns out to be the other woman in her story, 22-year-old Muzi (Jin Jing), back in her hometown to celebrate New Year and to pick up on the threads of her complicated life with her parents now separated. We might assume that the protagonist is the young woman seen in close-up in the opening sequence, telling a story about an encounter in an apartment block-the sort built in the town by Hong Kong people in the ’90s, she says. Shot in her own hometown of Hangzhou in eastern China, Zheng’s black-and-white film may or may not be autobiographical per se, but in its jazzy extemporizing looseness, tendency to jump tracks, and intense focus on its careworn young heroine, it certainly feels highly personal. The winner of the Tiger Competition Award in Rotterdam in January, The Cloud in Her Room is a film with a very distinctive and appealing voice it was due to play in Film at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films season, now postponed because of the coronavirus, but watch this space, as Zheng’s debut is worth waiting for. Still, its structure is far from obvious, and its narrative-about a young woman tussling with past and present troubles, familial and romantic-emerges at its own leisurely pace in between the images. That might make the film sound improvised or shapeless, although it’s neither. It’s as if Zheng were shuttling from idea to idea, image to image, and leaving the viewer to latch on as best they can to this meandering train of thought. What The Cloud in Her Room also has in common with much young independent and experimental cinema through the generations is a free-associative, diaristic, even scrapbook feel. Possibly both: what her film certainly has in common with that cinema, and many other generations of debut cinema, is a sense of youth as a period of both insouciance and intense anxiety, when a dreamy or agitated young filmmaker can suck on a shot and then fling it away, just another cigarette end, before lighting up one more. So many cigarettes are smoked in the course of this Chinese debut feature-most of them long, slim, elegant-that you wonder whether Zheng is simply reflecting current Chinese social habits or possibly harking back to the Gauloise-laden salad days of the French New Wave. You might imagine the cloud in Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room as something like a comic-strip thought balloon: this is very much a film of pensive, sometimes airily abstracted moments. The Cloud in Her Room (Zheng Lu Xinyuan, 2020)
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