Matching the restless anomie of its cityscapes, or perhaps in contrast to their flurry of homogenous activity, Li Dongmei’s Guo Ran foregrounds an inscrutable austerity of the mind harboring currents both political and existential. Neither overt social critique nor sentimental dramatization of the psyche, the film finds its starkest expression, nonetheless, in a muted synthesis of both dimensions as its protagonist, Liyu (Li Manxuan), measures her days against a backdrop of urban sprawl. Expecting a child with her partner, Xiaotong (Wang Yitong), and by turns excited and enervated by this prospect, Liyu proves enigmatic, her interiority unveiled just partially by the various relationship dynamics she has with those around her.
What inheres throughout Guo Ran is the sensibility of glacial, helpless withdrawal: glacial in its ellipses and barely perceptible movements, and helpless because no particular malady appears to directly afflict the increasingly estranged couple. As with suffocation, the underlying cause — an absence of oxygen — is invisible to the eye, and while such a conceit might have led a less confident work astray, Li’s sophomore feature adroitly explores and exploits the multifaceted aspects of precarity in fashioning an impalpable sense of alienation. Where Mama, her 2020 feature debut, registered the last days of a pregnant mother amid the circadian rhythms of rurality, Guo Ran’s anonymous metropolitan locale (revealed to be Chongqing in the credits) charts a different kind of precarious existence: a nexus of youth, femininity, and white-collar credentialism that poses its own set of inarticulate melancholies. Xiaotong’s salary as a video editor ostensibly does not net them much, and even early on in Liyu’s pregnancy he begins to withdraw, both from intimacy and from broader communication. Liyu, on the other hand, faces her own problems. Her side of the family, we infer, may not be very close-knit; her own mother passed away from childbirth complications; and the periodic tests she undergoes at the hospital are perpetually tinged with foreboding.
This foreboding never quite comes to pass in the film’s brief 90 minutes (whittled down allegedly from a first cut that clocked in at 2.5 hours), in which whatever tenuous hope the couple holds out — or imagines themselves holding out — comes undone through the inertia of its frames alone. Perhaps the framing of Li’s characters mirrors their own perception of the world, as a white, neat, and antiseptic space from which little refuge is possible. And so languor becomes the order of the day, whether in the long, unbroken shots of balconies and sterile interiors or in the stiflingly verdant reveries that bookend this reality. In one such dream, a snake appears, its unblinking gaze auguring hope and dread alike. Liyu, recounting her late mother’s belief in the serpentine symbolism of pregnant dreams (a black snake represents a boy, a striped one a girl), has her own motherhood disturbed by the seemingly innocuous statement of her young niece Muzi (Zhang Zimu): “I thought of it lying dead in your tummy.” But the film’s title, intended as the name for Liyu’s unborn child, also bears the connotation of “sure enough.” Its compound structure — forged from “fruit” and “natural” — inexorably inverts its fertile metaphor into something fatalistic, and one gathers, from Guo Ran’s unceasingly quotidian rhythm, that its fatalism rests precisely on the assumption that it is part and parcel of motherhood and of all life.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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