QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A woman puts her contact leses on, wanders aimlessly around her apartment and intakes some sort of fake Chinese reenactment of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1976) before beginning and recycling the same routines again and again. The contacts work as metaphors for both seeing the world differently and the imprisoning cycle of routine.

The hopeful ending, in which the woman (Yunxi Zhong) breaks from the cycle and reaches for the door handle to exit her apartment, requires knowledge of the tragic ending to Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece for maximum appreciation. Contact Lens will, however, stir and rouse those familiar with the film that topped Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll as the greatest film ever made. It’s a poetic essay that sings a liberatory, even if challenging, song for cinema.

The filmmakers play with the metaphor of vision, and especially myopic vision, from start to finish. Things come in and out of focus, depths of field change, and in one shot the woman even appears rotoscoped and composited onto a separate, entirely out-of-focus background. The focus puller never gets a break. When she puts her contacts in or out, the depth of field changes from fully visible to fully blurry instantaneously. The aspect ratio also changes, constricting the woman to a tighter frame (from what appears to be a consumer camera) in imitation of the limits of domesticity.

Unlike Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Lu Ruiqi’s feature debut, a considerably more experimental film, does not have a duration of 202 minutes. Contact Lens makes do with a taut 78 minutes. It still feels long though and that’s a compliment (if this statement confuses you, please see Akerman’s quote about the passage of cinematic time). The almost fully subdued soundscape is a big part of why it feels longer than it is, and the strange (non-verisimilar) edits, shot choices, and effects add a flavour of ASMR (tingling sensation) to the feature that slow cinema (like Akerman) rarely approach, and that difference does a lot to separate her struggle of boredom from Jeanne’s struggle of depression. For the most part, these routines seem more reflective of boredom or even metaphor than depression or any other related mental health issues.

A life of routine and routine only, without any possibility for spontaneity, is a life where fulfilment is damn near impossible. Jeanne never breaks the cycle of her depression – or, if she does, she does so tragically – but her story helps the woman of Contact Lens break her own undesirable and trapping cycles. Technically, the story projected in her apartment is not Jeanne Dielman but an efficacious Chinese devotion to the great Belgian film. Even the kitchen and hairstyle look identical. This doesn’t just help ease potential copyright issues, it also emphasizes the empathetic power of motion pictures. She sees herself in Jeanne, and the Asian woman who plays the bored and depressed Dielman-figure translates this empathy into something visual and culturally familiar. The fantasy of the TV and the lifelessness of apartment life cross-pollinate with one another as characters move in and out of one frame and into the other, making this projection of empathy understandable for the audience.

And if “Jeanne” can liberate Yunxi’s character and force her to see from a new perspective, maybe she liberate you too.

Contact Lens premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.