Trap street

Trap Street by director Vivian Qu portrays ordinary experiences -- chance meetings, infatuations, and love -- in a familiar yet eerie setting riddled with both overt and implied surveillance. The characters in Trap Street are very believable yet begin as fish in an aquarium, oblivious to their immersion in a contemporary surveillance society. When personal lives accidentally and suddenly cross a certain line to provoke official concern, a seemingly free person is confined to a fish bowl of scrutiny and coercion.

The casual disregard shown for pervasive surveillance in Trap Street is both ironic and deliberately characteristic of life in our times. The protagonist played by Yulai Lu is a surveyor and a digital citizen of his particular patch of the global village. He spends his time after hours gaming online with his pals, creates his own digital mapping projects through his smartphone and does odd jobs installing video surveillance gear for sketchy clients.

Director Vivian Qu clearly maintains an open-ended approach to the story, free of pat answers or a formulaic resolution to the climactic events. The art of the film lies in Qu's choice to only subtly imply a point of view, allowing the performances and the story to unfold in a way that is open to interpretation. The Q&A session following the screening spoke to the success of Qu's light hand. A highly engaged audience offered diverse questions and insights, and expressed several responses to the story not intended by Qu.

Similarly, her leads, Yulai Lu and Wenchao He, are experienced actors who deliver measured, sincere performances. Lu and He convey a natural romantic connection but resist overplaying to the highly charged circumstances. As brought to life by the players, the atmosphere of the film is by turns realistic, banal, unobtrusive, carefree, intimate and stifling.

The bureaucratic backdrop of stark officialdom is reinforced by the confining streetscapes of Nanjing, the old Chinese capital under the Nationalists. The narrow field of view at street level used by cinematographers Mathieu Laclau and Li Tian leaves the viewer with the sense of belonging to a group of eerily omnipresent overseers.

Toward the close of the film the focus shifts from official scrutiny and social pressures and returns to the personal. The audience is left to consider what has just transpired. We tend to live our lives assuming the existence of an invisible but reassuring line that insulates our private lives from scrutiny. Is that line ever really there?

I was lucky to view the premier of Trap Street at the Walter Reade Movie Theater of the Lincoln Center, which was packed with an enthusiastic audience. I also participated its director's Question and Answer session right afterward the show. The audience were very interested and active in asking questions, which approximately 30 questions were asked and answered with respect to all aspects of the movies. This gave me a much better understanding of the circumstance in which the movie was made.

Trap Street initially follows narratives of a love story, appealing, elegant, and with a tint of nostalgia. However, the movie leaves many aspects of uncertainty for imagination, revealing skillful tactics of the director. As the story develops, all uncertainty accumulate together, causing great intensity and curiosity on the audience. As the intensity and curiosity gradually ease as the story unfolded, the movie comes to a surprising end, appearing initially out of expectation, but completely within the logical scope of the movie. This unexpected ending is the climax of Trap Street.

Black humor is a characteristics of all post modern movies, and is also evident throughout Trap Street. I strongly recommend to watch the movie in theater. I would also like to point out a possible regret of the movie: The director in the Q&A session emphasized this was not a movie of politics. I totally agree with her on this point. However, some audience are still overwhelmed by its political implications, as indicated by their questions, especially after the Snowden incident. The political implications of the movie compete with its artistic merits for attention from the audience, which is probably not the original intention of the director. But can we do any better as we are all living in a political society?

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.

Technology makes it easier than ever to find information, and yet more difficult than ever to determine the truth. With so many sources of information and ways for data streams to be manipulated, technology becomes as much a trap as it is a solution. In Trap Street, a young man uses electronic gadgets to earn extra cash as well as an edge in the dating scene. Through the use of the gadgets he also invites some unwelcome company. Falling deeper for a mysterious woman, he finds it increasingly difficult to turn away from what he wants to know and feel. This insightful and revealing film explores issues involving the use of surveillance technologies. While lacking in depth, it is intriguingly portrayed and in a non-judgmental manner that allows the audience to come to their own conclusions. Seen at the 2014 Miami International Film Festival.