“People across the country can see us.”
“They can?”
At the beginning of Zhu Shengze's new documentary, she begins by explaining the connection between online streaming and Chinese politics. After streaming and online showrooms became the most significant means of communication for many people in the director's home country, the government stepped in, banning several showrooms and passing laws on the nature of what could be shown online. Officially, as the opening of the film states, this level of scrutiny and control is needed as the “boundary between reality and virtuality” has become blurred and thus these steps are necessary to protect “netizens” worldwide.
As with her last features, “Xu Jiao” (2014) and “Another Year” (2016), Shengze focuses on giving an authentic portrayal of life in China. Given the recent developments regarding streaming, her new feature consists of a collage of various different showrooms, their hosts and their way of communicating with their followers. In a nutshell, “Present.Perfect” is the result of over 800 hours of raw material Shengze collected over the years an condensed into a two-hour-documentary. Divided into various segments, the bits and pieces from selected showrooms show the reality of the lives of people and the Chinese landscape as it is.
“Present.Perfect” is screening at the
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019
To be honest, an audience will have to invest more than time for Shengze's approach to her theme takes a while to get used to. To be specific, the segments from each showroom are not only quite long, but also showcase sometimes rather banal features of the host's life, rater dull scenes of various kinds of labor and often quite bleak landscapes. However, if one is eventually invested into the visual collage of lives and stories, the effect is quite interesting and profound.
Looking at the some of the showrooms, one may be struck at the level of honesty and detail they feature. There as scenes in which a street performer is interrupted by a worker threatening to take away his equipment or a man showing his wounds bleeding into the camera. Besides the obvious craving for recognition, which goes along with social or online media, there is also a deep level of loneliness and desperation in some of these segments. Sometimes there is even fear and aggression, for example, in the man eventually barking orders at the performer to hand over his equipment or the omnipresent scare of being shut down by the government and what kind of personal repercussions this might bring.
In the end, the audience – just like the actual viewers of the showrooms – has the task to find meaning in this vast ocean of content. The creation of (new) meaning may just be what the various hosts, and thus Shengze herself, is after; to answer the question whether we can and want to assign meaning to something which is at times banal. In that regard the footage offers interesting revelations about the creators, their surprising acts of humor and happiness as well as their level of frustration with themselves and the world around them.
“Present.Perfect” with its slow approach to its themes unquestioningly demand a patient, attentive viewer. It is a film which ultimately rewards those willing to make that investment with a revealing insight into today's China, its people and their crave for express and communicate through modern media. Considering these ideas it is also an appeal to the viewer to engage in this search for meaning, for the “real” China behind these images.
