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5. Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society: The Cinema of Divorce in the New Millennium
- University of Washington Press
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140 c h a p t e r f i v e Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society The Cinema of Divorce in the New Millennium Partly as a result of the simplified divorce procedures stipulated in the 2001 amendment to the Second Marriage Law and its 2003 modification , China’s divorce rate has spiked in the new millennium,1 and in response to this social phenomenon, cultural representations of broken marriages and dysfunctional families have flooded the media. One genre is the cinema of divorce, including films that center on the cinematic representation of marital strife and family crisis. Within this genre, two new trends of cinematic innovation can be identified. First, instead of narrating infidelity as a fable of social transformation and liberation of private desires,2 a sense of nostalgia prevails in recent films about divorce. Second, compared to the more conventional (or male-dominant) gender politics depicted in earlier works such as Mr. Zhao (Zhao Xiansheng; 1998) or I Love Beijing (Xiari nuan yangyang; 2001),3 the cinema of divorce in the new millennium often casts border-crossing women characters who take the initiative in filing for divorce, reshaping family relationships, and redefining the form and meaning of marriage. Deviating from stereotypical female figures, these women are represented as more freely able to navigate both private and public spaces, traverse the boundaries of the rural and the urban, and actively negotiate with male desire. Overshadowed by these strong women, their male counterparts appear weak or even emasculated. Does this new trend in gender politics indicate women’s acquisition of more power and agency in reconfiguring marital relationship and domestic space? Or can we read it as a cinematic projection of the formation of a new (feminized?) affective economy Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society 141 and moral fabric in the face of domestic and social chaos? How does this new cultural imagination of domestic affects engage with the prevailing sense of nostalgia for earlier (pre-capitalist) modes of life? cinema of divorce Persevering female protagonists who continue to perform their maternal duties in a broken home are featured prominently in Chinese films about divorce and marital strife. Sun Zhou’s Breaking the Silence (Piaoliang mama [literally “Pretty Mom”]; 2000) depicts a divorced woman (played by Gong Li) who is also a laid-off worker yet is singlehandedly raising her deaf son. This sentimental melodrama evades the social problem of the massive layoffs of women workers, a result of industrial restructuring and sexual discrimination. Instead, it glorifies one pretty mother’s individual struggle and self-sacrifice in what she believes to be the best interest of the next generation. Similarly, Shanghai Women (Jiazhuang mei ganjue; 2002), directed by Peng Xiaolian, one of the few Fifth Generation woman filmmakers , also features a middle-aged divorced woman as the person who is solely responsible for child-rearing duties. The first installment of Peng’s Shanghai Trilogy, Shanghai Women remaps the everyday space of Shanghai. It bears witness to the female protagonist’s (played by Lü Liping) bitter experiences of a series of broken marriages and her moves from one household to another.4 In the end, she gives up the plan of getting remarried once again in exchange for the physical space of a home or housing unit that she cannot afford to purchase, given the recent boom in real estate in Shanghai. Rather, she chooses to start a new life with her teenage daughter in a small rented apartment . This unexpected ending guides audience to speculate on the idea of a matriarchal commune, which harks back to the depiction of cross-generational sisterhood in Zhang Jie’s story “Love Must Not Be Forgotten.” Ning Ying is another Fifth Generation woman director. Her lowbudget film Perpetual Motion (Wuqiong dong), which premiered on International Women’s Day (March 8, 2006), also portrays an imaginary sisterhood, this time, of four middle-aged women who are either divorced or estranged from their husbands. Seemingly a response to criticism about the lack of female perspective in her previous neorealist films such as I Love Beijing, this film explores middle-aged women ’s libidinal agitation within an enclosed spatiotemporal framework.5 [44.200.82.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:40 GMT) Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society 142 The women’s disillusionment with the present and their individual memories of the past reveal a gendered nostalgia for the idealistic “Golden Era” of the 1980s, when the authenticity of interpersonal...