QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TIFF ROMANIA

The sky is grey and the streets are covered with a couple of feet of snow. Gigantic industrial chimneys billow smoke undaunted, thereby stifling residents, and helping to ensure that not a single ray of sun reaches the ground of this inhospitable urban space, however full of life and humour. Yanqi Chen’s debut finds vigour in a soulless environment, and beauty in chaos. This is, after all, very familiar territory. The unnamed city also happens to be the director’s birth place.

Hot colours are nowhere to be seen. This is a cold endeavour in more ways than one. Blue and teal hues prevail throughout this charming little comedy. The characters are similarly icy: they deliver their lines in deadpan mode, their bodies and voices wilfully stilted. They often face the camera, or stare at blank spaces/the middle of nothing. These are ordinary citizens living another listless day, forging ahead with their dull existence. Chen extracts humour and indeed sentiment from the small soliloquies and awkward interactions. He sets out to hamper monotony, He literally sheds light into grey, colourless existences.

This is a chronological however non-narrative film. It starts at the beginning of the day and it ends at night. Multiple individual stories are loosely intertwined as they navigate through their routi e. Their actions are often repetitive and coordinated: three people pick up a glass of wine simultaneously and at the same speed, and a whole bus full of people swing their heads sideways as two buskers perform for them. The sounds too are monotonous and synchronised. A pervasive accordion adds a touch of melancholia to the stories, while a rattle injects a little eeriness.

The brief predicaments are humorous and cryptic, and it is often malfunction that dominates the film. The motivation of the characters is simple: they wish to get to the end of the end, as the evening promises to offer some respite. Yet their discernment skills are as foggy as the weather. A large bookstand gets stuck in the doorway, forcing the residents to climb underneath it in order to get out of the flat, and leaving the two workers baffled as to how to remove the clunky piece of furniture. Passengers wait for a bus that may never arrive, and even if it does it may not stop for them. A school teacher complains that nobody understands her teaching methods, and that she hates her job more than anything else. Four young vigilantes seek to punish those dirty bastard who dare to urinate in public, thereby debasing their city with their antisocial and unhygienic habits. But one of their victims has a surprise for them, in the film’s funniest denouement.

This highly unusual and elliptical Chinese film is guaranteed to put a smile on your face, particularly with its charming, gently cathartic ending. The only problem is that it does occasionally slip into banality, and repetition becomes excessive. Still, this is a wacky picture of China you won’t have seen in many places. An inventive mixture of sombre reality and vivid, flirting illusion. Worth a viewing.

Day Tripper shows in Competition at the 23rd edition of Tiff Romania.