White River — Ma Xue
As we enter the last release wave of true Covid films — those titles both produced during and concerned with the real-world crisis — first-time director Ma Xue introduces a new sort of pandemic film in her debut White River.
As we enter the last release wave of true Covid films — those titles both produced during and concerned with the real-world crisis — first-time director Ma Xue introduces a new sort of pandemic film in her debut White River‘s meandering sexual release valve. Situated on the other side of the White River from Beijing, Yanjiao is known as the “sleeping city” after the people who work in Beijing but sleep in Yanjiao. Made in South Korea by a Chinese national, Ma’s Mandarin-language film recalls both the sexually explicit romantic films that have of late become increasingly impossible to make within China and, perhaps unironically, the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers who obviously inform Ma Xue’s sense of urban dissatisfaction, wandering lost characters, and the extraordinary focus on uber-ordinary individuals. White River is an unrestrained and unfiltered penetration into the depressive social isolation and unambiguously apathetic spirit that pervaded the worst of the Covid years, a time prolonged in the country it originated in thanks to the “Zero-COVID” policy.
Filled from start to finish with a plethora of explicit and borderline intense sex scenes, White River is neither a romance nor a drama. In fact, the only sub-genre to ascribe to White River that even makes any amount of sense is the pandemic film, where lockdowns, quarantines, testing, and social bubbles fill the frame as just another part of life. But the sub-genre simply puts non-indiscrete clothes on the near-pornographic assay of sexuality. Instead, Ma’s feature piques interest as an episode of sexual maundering in the life of Yang Fan (Yuan Tian), a married woman who allows the pandemic to disrupt her life heretofore built on routine.
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