New Chinese Cinema Is Pink (?)
Female gazes in the FIPRESCI selection at GDH 62
Historically the first cultural event created for the purpose of awarding and showcasing the excellence in Chinese-language cinema, Taipei Golden Horse has remained faithful to its long-standing tradition, blending the glamour of stardom with fresh, bold features by emerging talents in its 62nd edition.
Of the forty-seven titles running in the main competition, twelve were included in the FIPRESCI selection for the Best First Feature in Chinese language. Its diversity, in terms of approach to narrative, cinematic language, and audience engagement, made the task of scrutiny as compelling as it was arduous.
Against this variegated background, if one were to search for a common thread among the shortlisted works, that would be the recurrence of female-centered narratives, as eight out of twelve films confronted with the issues embedded in marriage and the nuclear family from the point of view of female protagonists. Even more noteworthy, however, is the fact that the most convincing four among them were directed by women who overtly challenge the cinematic representation of the female body, eschewing the conventions of the male gaze and its voyeuristic implications.
Beginning with Taiwanese production A dance with rainbows (Hèn nǚ de nìxí) by Lee Yi-shan, which has been awarded the Golden Horse Award for Best Action Choreography, main character Ling (Lin Yi-ting) is portrayed in the act of mastering boxing –a tool to achieve both physical and mental resilience against the disruption of her friends’ circle and family. Covered in sweat, blood, and almost no tears, Ling is an athlete undertaking the impossible feat of equating her body to a machine, whose increasingly fast and precise punches sweep away the attempts at sexualizing her –signified by the ‘boxing beauties’ talent show that Ling only temporarily partakes in. In doing so, Lee Yi-shan puts forward a new definition of gender struggle, in which the opponent is not directly faced on the ring (all the matches shown in the film are of female boxing), yet embodied by the characters that intend to bound Ling to her supposedly ‘female’ duties. The struggle of the athlete of overcoming one’s own limits thus overlaps with the emancipatory need to reassert control over one’s body and its use.
Along this line, Tsou Shi-ching’s Left-handed girl (Zuǒpiězi nǚhái) and Lilly Hu’s 1 Girl Infinite (Bùkěnéng nǚhái) push the concept even further, entering the domain of heterosexual as well non-normative sexuality, intimacy, and affection.
In fact, while Left-handed girl’s young co-protagonist I-Ann (former model Ma Shi-Yuan, winner of the Golden Horse Award for Best New Performer) seldom engages in sexual intercourse with her employer, she is never portrayed as succumbing to the power relations implied by her employee status. If anything, she seems to accept pleasing the owner of the betel nut stand merely out of boredom, and however explicit, the scenes where this happens the act is non-performative, and unconcerned with the male point of view. As asserted on several occasion throughout the movie, as her character progressively decides to take hold of her life by cutting ties with her father and contending her role as mother of little I-Jing (Best Supporting Actress-nominee Nina Ye, arguably the most outstanding child performance of the main competition), I-Ann remains in control from beginning to end, without complying with the male-imaginary-driven archetype of manipulator, who uses her beauty to achieve her aims. Rather, while conscious of her looks, I-Ann strives to set things right by lowering her family’s dependence on traditional male figures, as well as on their immediate (yet heavily prejudiced) kin.
Somewhat different is the take of PRC-born director Lilly Hu, whose performance as coprotagonist in 1 Girl Infinite (a nominee for Best Editing) alongside actress Chen Xuanyu (playing as Yinjia) renders a nuanced depiction of a toxic, same-sex situationship in urban mainland China. Here, intimate scenes between Tong Tong (Lilly Hu) and Yinjia, whose eroticism is signaled by a crimson color palette (the same color as Tong Tong’s hair dye) and close-ups that, despite lingering on their body shapes, avoid framing genitalia directly, stand in stark contrast with those where the two are forced into heterosexual intercourses with Tong Tong’s self-proclaimed boyfriend (Yang Bo). In this case, the camera eye is unmistakably voyeuristic, functioning as an intrusive, scopophilic apparatus that parallels the male counterpart’s haste to get as close as possible to the source of his pleasure, and to achieve it as fast, too. Through said juxtaposition, director Hu explicitly exemplifies how internalized prejudices concerning sexuality (such as that preventing Tong Tong from acknowledging Yinjia as a legitimate partner, despite the latter’s sincere displays of care) help perpetuate rape-like practices of female subjection, while also providing directions for a possible alternative – i.e., the gentle, intimate plays between Tong Tong and Yinjia at the beginning of the film.
Finally, however more conventional in appearance, the Singapore-led coproduction Amoeba (Hé) by director Tan Si-you (winner of the Taiwan Film Critics Society Award in addition to the FIPRESCI Prize) contributes to detaching the representation of teenage girls from the usual tropes of child-like femininity, naïveté, and emotional superficiality. Despite their uniforms and the strict upbringing, 16-year-old Choo (Ranice Tay) and her three friends do not fail to notice how the educational mission of their all-girls school lies upon a postcolonial lie of connivance with the British occupier, erupting in exhilarating philippics against the non-furtherly specified ‘Singaporean spirit.’ Also, fascinated by the criminal past of one of their personal drivers, Uncle Phoon (Tony Leung’s co-star in A city of sadness and Taiwanese New Wave’s veteran Jack Kao), they team up to form their own gang, learning from Uncle how to look tough in the street and to care for one another. Against the JK-like imagery crystallized especially by Japanese exploitation cinema, Amoeba refutes the sexualization of its protagonists, reestablishing adolescence as a key moment in the formation of political awareness, social relations, and emotional affinity, with no room for high school crushes or innuendos.
Overall, it would be hard to say whether the observed commonalities in the latest Chinese-language first features signal a nascent trend within the East Asian landscape towards a female-centered perspective, or whether they amount to nothing more than a fortunate exception engendered by a forward-thinking festival selection –hence, the question mark in the main title. That said, it appears that the industry has begun riding the wave of uncompromising representations of gender and body, if only to meet the tastes of an audience whose cinéphilie increasingly informs consumption patterns, and which has lost interest in works advocating over-simplistic binarism, as well as superficially accommodating inclusivity.
Giovanni Stigliano Messuti
©FIPRESCI 2025