SMOKE AND MIRRORS Midi Z’s Nina Wu and the Cinema of Self-reflection
‘They don’t just want to take my body. They want to take my soul!’
An actress (played by Wu Ke-Xi) finally lands her breakout role after a series of false starts and insubstantial ‘extra’ parts. But there’s a catch. She must submit to full-frontal nudity and an explicit sex scene. The male director (Shih Ming-Shuai) isn’t averse to physical abuse on set. The actress is humiliated for missing cues, endlessly objectified in both diegetic and extradiegetic spaces. At one point, she is slapped across the face. Her anxiety starts to manifest delusions and paranoid hallucinations; is she being followed? The young woman she believes to be trailing her may well be an incarnation of impostor syndrome; is the ‘right’ actress for the role waiting to take her place?
The state of mind of the actress – the titular character of Nina Wu (Midi Z, 2019) – is replicated by the film form, with temporal jumps forward and flashbacks intercut with possible subjective fantasies. These disrupt any sense of narrative cohesion. As Nina’s grip on reality falters, she discovers that repressed memories can no longer be contained, leading to a final reveal that many audience members will likely find uncomfortable.
But, then again, a film that is responding to the #MeToo and reading the firsthand accounts of the actresses he had abused. ‘I rewrote the whole script and the structure and everything,’ she told Deadline Hollywood last year. The resulting film – co-written by Midi Z – covers dark territory and couldn’t be more timely; while the screen industries of Asia have not explicitly been a part of this rather West-centric discourse, Midi Z locates his fifth feature within a broader Asian context with the claim that ‘the position of female filmmakers in Asia, Japan and Korea is still so troublesome’. In fact, he believes that he found it difficult to secure funding for Nina Wu because its story is told from a female perspective.
