In Qu Youjia‘s debut feature, “She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones” two Chinese secondary school students — one boy, one girl — with very different approaches to life, cross paths through their last year, immersed in a pot-of-boiling-water environment as they prepare for university entrance exams. Amidst this non-normative portrait of conformity or lack thereof, the filmmaker creates a poem of restless adolescence framed within the context of the Chinese educational system. “Study hard, live better” writes the male protagonist’s teacher on the blackboard, publicly shaming students whose grades have fallen too severely.
But Qu’s hero, Zhuang Zhou, is not nearly as late-teen insufferable as the male protagonists of Nehir Tuna‘s “Dormitory” (2023) — which follows a student caught between the secular and religious spaces of Turkish schooling — or Giovanni Tortorici’s “Diciannove” (2024), whose main character’s obsession with philosophy pinballs him from university to university as he looks disdainfully down at others. This makes “She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones” a curious, if not sometimes confusing (but never disorienting), and unconventional coming-of-age story, positioned within a very specific space bound to shape the rest of one’s life. The film made its world premiere in the 2024 Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section, where it received a Special Mention from the section’s youth jury, and most recently featured in the Five Flavours Asian Film Festival’s New Asian Cinema section.
She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones is screening at Five Flavours
One evening in a secondary school gym, the impulsive and eccentric Zhuang Zhou (Zhang Taiwen) spots a girl, Meng Ke (Miao Jijun), experimenting with a track-and-field starting gun by shooting it off repeatedly. Taking the blame for the “theft” of the sports pistol, he begins to fixate on the idea of Meng Ke, fascinated by everything about her — despite her lonely and socially avoidant nature. However, the pair couldn’t be more different. Zhuang Zhou is aimless, naïve, impulsive (in the film’s Berlinale press notes, Qu himself calls the character “sloppy”), and naturally brainy, while Meng Ke excels on the track team and admits to existing in a constant state of fear, seemingly disaffected by the world around her.
The filmmaker threads together their two stories as they float in and out of each other’s lives, one influencing the other in turn. Zhuang Zhou decides to join the track team in pursuit of joy rather than conventional academic success, while the latter is destabilized into a new way of thinking by the boy’s vibrantly happy-go-lucky, go-with-the-flow attitude. Qu’s very winding script certainly captures the confusion and emotional rollercoaster of adolescence, but it ultimately grows muddled at times. This is epitomised by two somewhat jarring time jumps, mostly to serve the story’s progression rather than a convincing emotional development. Nevertheless, the filmmaker puts together a very compelling set of thematic elements and references, even if you have to dig around for them or do your research.
For instance, Qu gives the two protagonists the birth names of Chinese philosophers Confucius (Zhuang Zhou) and Mencius (Meng Ke), even while they represent two characters archetypically defined by the few specific aforementioned characteristics. Early in the film, Zhuang Zhou catches an opaque red plastic bag he spots floating in the wind — becoming, again, so focused on its presence that it follows him through the rest of the film. This plastic bag is a commonplace item in contemporary China, used for takeout, groceries and more, but Zhuang Zhou’s behavior, too, takes after the movement of the bag. His impish personality can come off as almost too childish at times, making him hard to relate to — but it can be read also as a nod to neurodivergence or simply a different way of seeing the world. The repeated act of placing the red plastic bag over his head, perhaps even points to a form of stimming.
It is Qu’s heavy emphasis on aesthetics that ultimately triumphs. Many of the film’s promotional stills are gently oneiric and almost surrealist, already giving a sense of the film to come: Meng Ke with her back to the camera, Zhuang Zhou with the bag over his head, Meng Ke shooting off the starting gun while sitting askew. (The filmmaker also cleverly uses the “movement” of the red plastic bag to create an ever-so-subtle swipe transition.)
The director, focused on the environment in which the two young characters live, flexes a painterly approach to direction and cinematography by Lv Qing. Leaning toward pastel and muted colors, Qu lets the camera take its time to dwell, not always letting the characters become the natural focal point of every scene. He further gives the audience plenty of time to soak in the environment while also offering up smaller details, like water dripping off the end of an umbrella. Topping off the film’s visual style is its soft, lush color grading, creating a sense of ephemerality to represent the fleeting nature of this age.
One of the film’s unexpected standout elements is its dialectical portrait of so-called “unconventional” families, as both teens’ parents are divorced. Zhuang Zhou’s support system consists of a loving blended family of his mother, stepfather, and biological father, the last of whom maintain a genuine friendship with his ex-wife’s new husband. Conversely, Meng Ke’s parents would rather leave her to rot by herself in their apartment, taking care of the moving boxes; their absence is easily felt in the film just as the support of Zhuang Zhou’s three parents is equally palpable. This element of nonconforming parenthood is only part of a larger theme of knowing one’s place. Some of the film’s earliest and last images are of uniformed students in perfect rows, a somewhat ironically regimented salute to the conformity culture that Qu is attempting to shift askew. As the filmmaker noted in a Q&A at Five Flavours, the English title is a lyrical interpretation of this idea: sitting amongst other norm-abiding adolescents. Or better yet, it’s the idea of having sat — but will be sitting no longer. On the flip side, the Chinese title to that very track and field starting pistol — or rather, a gun that signals the start of something, again a nod wave to this coming-of-age period.
There is no right or wrong message to take away from the film, but “She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones” will certainly leave you thinking by the end. For some audiences, it may be partly out of confusion, but hopefully for most, it will be out of curiosity and an urge to be comfortable with that discomfort.
