by MEAGHAN WINTER
IMAGE/Flickr via sandy.redding
On the outskirts of an isolated village in Southern China, surrounded by mountains, a woman meets a married schoolteacher for a tryst in a pasture, and during her dazed walk home finds a glowing stone. The sky parts, a dark form passes across the sun, and the woman falls down. Not many scenes later, the village has become a UFO theme park, transformed by American dollars and adorned with flags and sculptures. A marching band proclaims that it celebrates the future. The premise of Xiaolu Guo’s film UFO In Her Eyes sounds dystopian; arriving at the theater after two weeks in Beijing, I had to double-check the film’s program to confirm that it wasn’t a documentary.
In the film, based on her novel of the same name, Xiaolu Guo takes post-Mao China as her protagonist. The film satirizes both China’s embrace of commercialism and its government’s paranoia about the unknown or “sensitive.” Guo writes that Western audiences tend to either romanticize China or view it negatively because of Communism, and as a filmmaker she’s not interested in making “another conventional sleepy lazy Chinese film” that fulfills expectations about the countryside. Instead she creates fabulist narratives that ask universal questions about how “a small person tries to find a path for survival… amid a totalitarian society—it is the perpetual task of Sisyphus and his task can never be completed.”
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