The tension between individuality and conformity is traditionally one of the main subjects tackled in art, and with good reason – who better than artists know how difficult it is to fit in? Who is better positioned to address the difficulties in staying true to one’s personality and dreams within a society that is bent on making us conform and act the way our parents, friends and spouses expect us to?
Xixi is screening at Busan International Film Festival
Such tension lies at the heart of “Xixi”, a thoughtful documentary that looks at the life of an eponymous Chinese dancer and improvisation artist living in Europe. Xixi is the archetype of the bohemian woman, who cannot stay put for long in one place and hitchhikes her way through countries and life. She sees herself as a wandering artist and a free soul, one who doesn’t care for such trivial things as having money, a job or a home, devoting herself instead to her art and new daily experiences. But some other people will inevitably see her more suspiciously as a homeless person and a lice-infested bum.
What makes Xixi’s life especially difficult is that she has a young daughter who lives in France with her French dad. One day the restless Xixi left both husband and daughter behind to live the bohemian lifestyle in which she truly flourishes, but doesn’t she have duties now toward her daughter? Doesn’t the fact that she now is a mother restrain her freedom as a human being and as an artist? Isn’t Xixi just being immature and selfish?
Check also this interview
The documentary can explicitly ask these questions without sounding professorial or preachy because the filmmaker behind the camera, Taiwanese director Fan Wu, is Xixi’s close friend. After encountering her in Berlin’s avant-garde circles, Wu became fascinated with Xixi and decided to do like her and start a video diary documenting her own daily life, with footage shot by both women over the years used in the film. “Xixi” is thus almost as much about Wu as it is about Xixi, as both women’s diaries are used to illustrate and problematize what it means to be an artist and a woman in China and Europe today.
What makes this documentary really work is how much the filmmaker recognizes herself in her subject while still being enough of an outsider that audiences can adopt her perspective. She too, as a thirty-something Taiwanese woman with artistitic inclinations and from a traditional family, asks herself the same questions about individual freedom and happiness. She regularly returns through her diary to the subject of her own family, especially her grandmother, who sacrificed her own dreams and aspirations to obey society and serve men.
This first-person narration and perspective gives the essay-like documentary its emotional resonance, while Wu always manages to find interesting and poetic shots to illustrate her offscreen thoughts and meditations. Shots of fish in an aquarium for example, going forever around in a circle, as many of us, women or men, perhaps do. Or filming through various circular openings, as though peeping from a hole at Xixi and the freedom she represents.
At the same time, Xixi’s own video diary is a fascinating insight into her lifestyle and her own thoughts, dreams and fears. We thus switch from one perspective to the other, sometimes seeing the wild, strange Xixi screaming and waddling in mud for the needs of an artistic performance, and at other times watching her simply sharing touching moments with her daughter. This makes her both a strange person to many audience members, and somebody most of us can relate to, again illustrating the difficult balancing act “Xixi” successfully pulls off.
Normality and conformity are embodied by Xixi’s estranged husband, who is asking a judge to restrain her from seeing her daughter, believing she is a bad influence on her. It is a testimony of the documentary’s effectiveness and nuanced perspective that by this stage we can both understand the husband’s point of view and feel how unfair the accusation is. In perhaps the film’s most touching scene, mother and daughter are seen bonding together as they play the guitar and improvise a song, illustrating how it is possible to express oneself and connect through art. Yet at another point, Xixi is unable to do the same with her own mother, showing how artistic expression cannot always bring people together.
The film’s greatest accomplishment is ultimately the way it manages to make the life of one individual with such a specific lifestyle resonate so much and feel universal – without suppressing or denying her own individuality and personality. “Xixi” asks what it means to be a free individual in such a collectivist society as China, but also in the West, where social pressure to conform is also inescapable. It asks what it means to be a woman in a traditionally patriarchal environment, but it also looks at intergenerational trauma and how our past weighs on us. Any human being can recognize themselves in the dilemmas faced by Xixi and Wu, and ultimately “Xixi” is an invitation to look at ourselves and wonder how free we really are.
