NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2024 (April 3-April 14)

[Chris Knipp]

JIAJUN "OSCAR" ZHANG: ALL, OR NOTHING AT ALL (2023)


YOYO AND LAN TIAN (CENTER) IN ALL, OR NOTHING AT ALL

Choreographed love-longing in a giant Shanghai mall

The filmmakers, male and female, director Jiajun "Oscar" Zhang and Korean writer Hee Young Pyun who met in London, have an affinity for shy couples stories. Their film is shot in Academy ratio: showing that the vast two-tower Global Harbor mall in Shanghai may be felt as, in a way, strangely confining.

The Global Harbor mall, opened in 2013, seems timeless, retro, and grand. It is classical Roman in theme, with huge corinthian columns, wall statues, decorative borders, and high domes. And yet it is a cathedral, a place of worship and awe. It is inside rectangular skyscrapers, but seems round inside, a miracle. Its colors and gleaming surfaces awe and delight. It is good to watch this film with a powerful sound system: the space pulsates and throbs, has a basic tone that envelops us, and is beautiful yet oppressive too, and feels like an acid trip. This is a wonderful, open-ended film if you just give yourself up to it. There are many beautiful shots. But as has been pointed out, the plot line is a bit thin at times, and speaks of love-yearning and loneliness.

There are two halves. During one, a young man, Lan Tian , is filming the mall, or pretending to. He becomes fascinated with a shy young woman who is working at a shop selling skin treatments (cosmetics). She is called Yoyo. He gets her attention for a while, but at the end he is filming her from afar, begging her to look at him, but she does not. He comes up very close on her face with his telephoto lens till she is just a bright cluster of pixels. Whoosh!

The second story features the young woman, Yoyo, who now is an architecture student from London who wants to return there to study art. Her mother and grandmother question this. A personal reference here, because the writer Hee Young Pyun was studying architecture in London when director Zhang met her, and then switched to film. Yoyo now becomes fascinated with Lan Tian, this time a slim young man with earrings who is at a dance school in the mall called Hip Hop Gang. He gets drawn into a public performance to fill in but isn't one of the pros. Yoyo and Lan Tian (this time) knew each other years before, and dated once. Now they keep meeting up, but he never seems really interested. Yoyo has a hint of a secondary romance also with a sad-faced, droopy-haired coffee shop employee who makes espressos for her every day that are ornamented with snowflakes and hearts. He seems to be an admirer, but is too shy to reply when she talks to him.

Snow is another motif, because apart from the snowflakes drawn in cappuccino foam, Yoyo and Lan Tian keep talking about the day when they were in school when, she says, it snowed in Shanghai. And in the other story there is a wall of the mall that depicts a beautiful enveloping snowstorm - a real one. And then near the end, "snowflakes" fall down all over the mall from the dome agove. At the end, Yoyo, high above on a stairway, with the snowflakes falling and the music playing loudly like a juke box hurdy-gurdy, is calling down to Lan Tian, down with the dancers, calling to him in a whisper, "Lan Tian, Lan Tian, Lan Tian, look at me!" as the other Lan Tian was calling down to the other Yoyo, at the end of the first iteration of this fairy tale in a giant mall.

As the filmmakers point out at foreign festivals - this film's Chinese title means "All the Sad Young People": the young people who seem to predominate at the mall are thus felt to be a little sad and lost, though they seem delighted enough when the snowflakes are falling. They have things to do in the mall, but no overriding purpose. The Lan Tian of the first iteration has found one: he is shooting a film, or rather "gathering information" for one, about the mall. The Yoyo of the second iteration is an apprentice architect. But the filmmakers see the youth of the mall is somewhat adrift.

Director Zhang and his collaborator Hee Young Pyun approach the location with an eye for its structure and its way of interrupting human interactions and dominating them. Ultimately the overall subject, due to having the alternate storylines instead of just one, is meant to be the place where they play out, more than them. Such is the film's special fascination. But also in a way its limitation, because by the time the second storyline has begun, the novelty of the mall is beginning to wear off and the overwhelming space may be felt as an intrusion that trivializes the narrative content a bit.

Obsessives may find material here for academic studies of minute ways in which moments from one iteration are repeated with variation in the following one. (Which is the first story? descriptions make it the one with Yoyo as the protagonist; but in the screener I watched, that came second.). It may be that the cutting is more interesting than the scenes, and the roar and hum, incidental diegetic music and white noise of the sound track most interesting of all: it captures the strange enveloping spirit of a place like this. And Zhang is also not for nothing interested in both architecture and dance. The crowds Lan Tian and Yoyo negotiate in the Global Harbor mall also contain choreographed figures, notably a gaggle of kids and adults who weave around between them, whose movements provide comical complications, as in Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, a possible comparison and influence.

Chinese director Zhang and his Korean collaborator writer Pyun join are reunited for this feature debut following a widely admired short called If You See Her, Say Hello. A style emerges here of blurred boundaries, rule-breaking narratives and use of odd lenses like cell phones and surveillance cameras to experiment with parallel stories told with lush, almost abstract closeups and overwhelming ambient sound, following on a similar timeline and in identical places. We follow two seemingly separate romantic tales, where the same actors reverse their desires in encounters with usual passersby, controlling vendors, rich clients, or wacky entertainers. We become spectators at the Global Harbor mall, where the two sketchy love stories may be a gentle mockery of our efforts to make sense of our people-watching.

All, or Nothing at All, 124 mins., in Mandarin and Shanghainese, debuted at Tallinn Black Nights (Estonia), Nov. 2023. Screened for this review as part of of Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA's New Directors/New Films series (Apr. 3-13, 2024). Showtimes:
Thursday, April 11
8:30pm, FLC Walter Reade Theater (Q&A with Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang)
Friday, April 12
5:45pm, MoMA T2 (Q&A with Jiajun "Oscar" Zhang)