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Vivian Qu’s second feature begins and ends with images—the first mysterious, the second infused with bitter irony—of a colossal sculpture of Marilyn Monroe in her iconic blowing-skirt pose. What happens in between is a searing indictment of political corruption and the treatment of women in today’s China. When a teenage beach resort employee captures footage of a powerful politician coercing two twelve-year-old girls into his room, she becomes the unwilling center of a potentially explosive scandal. Qu tells her story using a large cast of characters, whose complex motivations expose a tangled web of corruption in which everyone is complicit. “A skillful combination of tense, dark drama with biting social commentary” (Fionnuala Halligan, Screen Daily). (Dir.: Vivian Qu, China/France, 2017, 107 min., DCP, Mandarin with English subtitles)
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