One of the more welcome upsets in recent cinema history occurred in 2022, when Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles unseated Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the top choice on Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list, a critic-polled survey conducted decennially. Generally a male-dominated list — Citizen Kane held the top spot for five decades prior — the inclusion and placement of Akerman’s masterpiece was an unprecedented triumph and a welcome change of pace. In that regard, it makes perfect sense that Jeanne Dielman becomes a major supporting player in Contact Lens, the feature debut by Chinese filmmaker Lu Ruiqi. Purporting to “imagine the emancipation of women from the confines of narrow spaces and the tedium of routine lives,” Contact Lens wields the power of cinema as both tribute and successor to Jeanne Dielman, transcending what it means to see cinema as “escapism.”
Contact Lens centers around an unnamed protagonist (played by Yunxi Zhong), a young woman stifled by existence. She lives alone in a single-bedroom apartment, where the only real noise derives from the oppressive sounds of a microwave’s finishing beeps and the high-pitched whistle of a boiling tea kettle. To break free from the monotony of life, she escapes to the outside to fill in her notebook with images she sees and film strangers with a camcorder, even striking a friendship with another young woman who tattoos her body, determining the location based on dart toss. The other prominent feature in the protagonist’s life is a projector screen in her apartment, perpetually displaying what at first looks to be a shot-for-shot Chinese remake of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. As time dilates in the protagonist’s apartment, it’s evident that the Jeanne Dielman screen is not a regular film by any stretch of the imagination, but a gateway to another life.
Like Delphine Seyrig’s Dielman, Contact Lens’ protagonist is defined by repetition, waking up in the same room every day, burdened by the same routines, even going so far as to talk back to her microwave’s incessant beeping. Her true solace in the world comes from her contact lens, which are burned with the memories of images she’s seen, allowing her to relive favorite moments before they fade away. The protagonist is also frequently visited by a young girl and her unseen mother, presumably specters of her own childhood. Lu is depicting a woman in prison, meted out with fits of abstraction, and the real question mark belongs to the ever-present Jeanne Dielman screen. At first resembling a conventional motion picture, the in-universe protagonist of that film also finds herself trapped, such as when she approaches the camera to answer an off-screen doorbell and slams into the lens as if it were a giant glass wall. Further manipulation from the protagonist finds its way into the film, such as a disturbance of the projector screen warping the table in the faux Dielman’s kitchen. Contact Lens is ultimately an understanding these two women have of the other’s circumstances, and how they may be the key to each other’s freedom.
“Escapism” can have an ugly, negative connotation, largely referring to blockbuster, popcorn entertainment, the sort of film where one shuts their brain off and leaves their worries at the cinema’s door in order to partake in a studio-engineered rollercoaster ride. Lu’s film offers escapism of another color, asserting that life is the sum of its very ephemerality, and film offers true preservation in images, long after our memories have faded and our sight has failed us. Contact Lens feels like revelatory work, turning to cinema history to combat ennui and show us a path to making our lives a better place.
Published as part of Prismatic Ground 2025.
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