The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison recommends you quickly track down a new film by Xiaogang Feng WE GIRLS (China, 2025)

Yes, he’s back! Xiaogang Feng was China’s most successful director. His films were printed in IMAX. They did top dollar business at home and English sub-titled disks were in all the Asian grocery stores. 

We heard  about a Xiaogang Feng theme park and saw him appear in Stephen Chow‘s Kung Fu Hustle and Guan (Black Dog) Hu’s 2015 Mr. Six Xiaogang Feng’s work was frequently exceptional - Aftershock, Assembly, If You Were The One(s) - and Wo bu shi Pan Jin Lian/I Am Not Madam Bovary, which was where the trouble seems to have started.

That one had the state machinery battling Fan Bingbing as a single woman trying to protect her good name. It was a corrective to Zhang Yimou’s conformist 1992 Qiu Ju da guan si/ The Story of Qui Ju.. The release was held up and there were rumors of demanded edits. Zhang Yimou, fresh from his triumphs with the Beijing Olympics, had a string of substantial budget A features in global distribution, while in an alarming change of pace, Feng Ziaogang was working on series TV, sequels and Only Cloud Knows, a bland romance shot in New Zealand.

Xiaogang Feng’s new Xiang Yang · Hua/We Girls has just had what they call “ a soft launch” here. The film is arresting from the first shot, which takes the camera into a 2010 Chinese women’s prison that could give a few pointers to the Salvadorian one where Trumpy sends people with green cards, the one I keep on seeing on TV news. That's pretty scary.

Arrested for phone sex work, Liying Zhao is put in charge of mute fellow new inductee Ju Wang. Raising a hearing impaired child has given her knowledge of sign language -  viz some comedy of her mistranslating the girl’s abusive responses. The cell boss inmate tells them no one is allowed to go to sleep before she does because their snoring might keep her awake.

More favorable treatment is given their squad when they need to train to perform for the prison’s Qingming Festival celebration  - not unlike the Army Entertainer Unit in Feng’s  Youth.  It’s not long before there’s a punch-up in the squat toilet and surveillance camera freeze frames of their solitary confinement.

Abruptly, we go to the pair’s same-day release, disturbingly free of parole supervision  - an envelope with their prison record and a small amount of yen. The apparently severe supervisor also slips her home phone number into the packet. “Doctors and wardens are the two professions that don’t want to see their customers again.”  The steel wall doors, opening to throw light onto the duo, is a deft touch.

Met by the three-wheeler driver from the gang where she learned her lock picking skills, Ju Wang has the only person who has ever shown her any kindness, stub out a cigarette on her hand. This film keeps on setting up expectations that it reverses.  Without shelter, she breaks into a sticker covered abandoned car and traffic wardens steal her last cash. Desperate to recover her child from the orphanage and provide her with a Two Hundred Thousand Yen cochlear implant, Liying Zhao’s character does no better at honest work. 

Together, the luckless pair do find ways to survive, renting a leaky apartment in a condemned building overlooking the rail tracks and performing simple-minded scams. They revive the Sacha Guitry gag of the the passer-by who recognises the girl who was begging, passing herself off as deaf the day before, now claiming to be blind.

Salvation presents itself with the prospect of royalties from a world-wide-net commercial using Ju Wang’s thieving skills but she refuses, outraging her associate, who sees her daughter facing adoption. The film explains why, with the re-introduction of the grim Lao Gie baby-farming character, mixing Fagin, the Godfather and a dash of Stanley Kowalski. Characteristically, he is given a back story which makes him a victim, like the ex-prisoner girls.

 It is a distinct change from the director’s preceding work but you can still see his preoccupations. They keep on mentioning "A World Without Thieves." This is a film that never lets you stay comfortable with what you're watching.  The script defies anticipation and keeps on swinging from outrageous excesses of melodrama to convincing documentation. 

Unsympathetic authority figures prove to have plausible motivations. Touches take on new significance - scenics of the passing train, Ju Wang’s criminal back ground, the glimpse of the abandoned daughter through the institution fence which repeats the photo that Liying Zhao had pinned over her cell bunk bed and comes up again in a telling montage.  Editing is particularly deft, as is camerawork, which is strikingly different from the images of Feng Xiaogang’s earlier films, though the greenish tone of Chinese laboratory work is still evident in the early scenes. The two leading performances are stellar.

Hard-charging popular entertainment, We Girls has had a modest success on its home turf  but this one is also a determined depiction of dysfunctional society. The China here is run down and hostile, even more so than in I Am Not Madam Bovary. Both offer implausibly sunny endings. It remains surprising that the new film got through censorship and was exported.

I rate this better than Parasite, though We Girls was never going to pick up another diversity Oscar. It would fit uneasily in a festival and is unlikely to play with the Dendy-Palace audience. However, anyone with a more than casual interest in film should home in on it immediately. The first night session pulled an attendance of round twelve, I was the only gweilo but also the only bloke. I asked the couple of C-Pop girls still there at the end of the titles for their take. They said they thought it was good and giggled. 

Move fast. This one is unlikely to get past Thursday.