Intimacy

You might call this “Still Life with Cell Phones.” Bin (Xinpeng Zhang), a restless young man in the Chinese town of Dali, lives with his dispassionate mother and works at her open-air tourist shop. Bin announces one day over dinner that he is going to move to Shanghai, where his world will be broader and opportunities will arise. Qin (Jingxuan Huang) is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy divorced father who doesn’t like to rehash painful subjects concerning Qin’s mother, leaving the young woman in an emotional void. Qin tries to mitigate the pain by sleeping late, seeing friends, having sex, and generally ignoring her dad’s wishes that she would get a job. Bin and Qin have a couple of things in common: both spend a lot of time looking at their phones, and they feel empty and alienated, unable to find a meaningful connection or purpose in life. Inevitably, they find one another, digitally speaking, opening up to each other on their phones. It’s an interesting idea and is structured as parallel stories, but filmmaker Yichun Jiang is so intent on demonstrating how time passes slowly when one is lonely that the viewer might reasonably check (more than once) to see if the pause button on the remote was accidentally pushed. Intimacy is a drama that feels mannered and calculated, with characters that only become more ghostly through their tangential tie. Not recommended. (T. Keogh)