White River
Directed by Ma Xue
Written by Ma Xue, Xu Weihao
Starring Tian Yuan, Song Ningfeng, Xu Weihao
Not rated
Runtine: 91 minutes
Available digitally December 1

by M. Lopes da Silva, Staff Writer

White River features housewife Yang Fan (Tian Yuan), her husband Yuan Yong (Song Ningfeng), and waiter Xiao Fang (Xu Weihao) who all live in the city of Yanjiao while it’s experiencing a quarantine lockdown. During the lockdown, the trio start experimenting with voyeurism/exhibition and cuckolding, leading to a sex act that makes the protagonist so uncomfortable that she leaves town.

Pornography is the depiction of fucking; eroticism is the space in between fucking. White River eroticizes depression: blankly staring at walls, or sadly cooking dinner, or slumping at single tables in restaurants. The rest of the film has the tempo of pornography: giving us shots of either penetration or masturbation at a tastefully angled but pre-ejaculatory pace. Longing is a lone ice cube that Yang Fan applies directly between her legs, as if daring herself to fuck something that she knows will make herself feel numb.

This frenzy of fucking and disassociation is intercut with vaguely surrealist aspirations: Yang Fan juices a watermelon sensually to water a houseplant; a child reads poetry or vaguely poetic statements in a monotone; a cell phone camera moves over dead ants arranged in a semiotic way. With the exception of possibly the watermelon juice scene, these scenes tend to feel discordant or flat when juxtaposed with the sex scenes.

And oh, the sex scenes. White River offers a frustrated heterosexual shuffling of penetrative sex positions: missionary/doggystyle/cowgirl, and a complete absence of focus on anything that could be considered pleasuring Yang Fan beyond penetration alone. Oral sex – who is she? Nobody here knows. Similarly the partners are shuffled, but never in a way that could potentially lead to a homosexual coupling. So Xiao Fang might watch Yang Fan and Yuan Yong fuck, or vice versa, but Yang Fan will never watch Yuan Yong and Xiao Fang have sex.

I’m not exactly sure who this film was made for. White River helpfully annotates itself to inform the viewer about background cultural knowledge: such as the fact that Yanjiao, essentially Beijing’s bedroom community, is also referred to as the “sleeping city.” It seems like the film is not intended for natives of Beijing or Yanjiao, so who is the intended audience? I’ve watched the film and I’m still not entirely certain. The cinematography has its most interesting moment when a phone camera is used to shoot Yang Fan performing yoga exercises early on in the film – her body switches fluidly from tensely framing the shot to dominating the shot with a distinctly erotic anxiety – but the rest of the camerawork largely uses the same lighting and compositions as pornography or moderately-budgeted advertising, which share a lot of aesthetic similarities.

Yang Fan starts to look sad after having sex, indicating that she is either sad or getting bored with her sex life, so she starts having solo and/or exhibitionist sex with more cisheterosexual men, and continues to look sad and/or bored afterwards. Meanwhile the awkwardly obvious avoidance of “no homo” interactions between the primary trio becomes compounded with other random moments of intolerance. Yang Fan pegs a man with obvious disgust, wrinkling her features and rolling her eyes during the act, only to flick her hand that held the dildo around like she was trying to rid herself of a grotesque feeling afterwards.

Biphobia is both the film’s climax and a spoiler: a threesome shared between Yang Fan, Yuan Yong, and Xiao Fang leads to Yang Fan leaving town alone on a train. That’s the last scene we get in the movie – one MMF bisexual threesome six-handedly destroying three perfectly weird little kinksters’ lives.

What does this mean? What message other than intolerance am I supposed to take away from this?