I have been very lucky not only to see this at the festival this week, but also to have an opportunity to participate in the Q&A session with the director who shed some, but unfortunately, not enough light on some of the film's mysteries.
The story starts off interesting. A young man falls for the accidentally met woman. The woman appears and disappears, cannot be contacted for days only to pop out of nowhere for a date. She clearly hides things away, but the main character does not seem to notice how uneasy she becomes in certain situations. There are some charming scenes, like when the man and his friend give the woman a lift, and Joan Baez's Donna Donna plays in the background, simple but beautiful.
I would say that the film as a whole is great, a combination of Kafka's Trial and Orwell' 1984 set in contemporary China, but with a universal message, as the director said, it is not an anti-Chinese government film, but a social commentary on how reliant we are on new technologies, and relationships between people in the era dominate by computers, Internet, where privacy is almost non-existent. What I found a bit disappointing is the very ending- you would need to judge for yourself whether it offers an explanation that would satisfy you. I think it could do with more exploration of the relationship between the characters, and more answers would be welcome.
