Review: Suburban Birds Is Provocative in Its Themes but Too Self-Conscious by Half

Its refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional declaration of Qiu Sheng’s arthouse bona fides.

Suburban Birds
Photo: Cinema Guild

Qiu Sheng’s Suburban Birds opens with a metaphorical declaration of purpose. The film’s first image—of men walking toward a tower—is shot through a square device that engineers are using to survey land in a Chinese suburb. This device resembles a camera on a tripod, which Qiu also rhymes with binoculars, as these machines and instruments are all used to frame, aestheticize, and quantify.

Like his engineer characters, Qiu is quite taken with the inherent mystery of land as well as the contours of various towers, bridges, and walkways, which suggest an attempt to tame the untamable. The first image is a nesting, auto-critical composition, then, as Qiu is filming his environment as it’s filmed by his characters. And the landscapes soon arise as protagonists in their own right, moving in accordance to their own biorhythms.

Suburban Birds has a dreamy, wandering intensity. Clearly inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Qiu informs his landscapes with an intangibly haunting grandeur. We see how settings dwarf and enclose people, offering comfort, particularly with the ripe greens of the woodland settings, as well as embodying casual, low thrumming forms of existential crisis. The hotel housing the engineers during their latest assignment is drab and impersonal, reflecting the characters’ loneliness back at them. No wonder that one of these men, Xiahao (Mason Lee), takes up with Swallow (Huang Lu), a beautiful woman staying down the hall from him and whom the engineers interviewed about a building’s collapse.

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This collapse is also, of course, symbolic—of the passing of time, of impermanency, of the unknowability of everything. Just as we settle into the film, expecting a reverie on Xiahao’s life as a watchdog of infrastructure, Qiu springs a second narrative strand. Xiahao wanders a desolate condemned school building and finds a student’s diary, which Qiu dramatizes as the story of group of pre-teen children who navigate young love and schoolwork, while also playing and surveying landscapes with an attentiveness that echoes Xiahao’s work.

One of the children is also named Xiahao (Gong Zihan), so it’s tempting to assume that Qiu is showing the same character in two stages of life. This impression is dashed when the two Xiahaos fleetingly intersect, though it can’t be a coincidence that the kids and adults mirror one another in myriad fashions, and are occasionally framed by Qiu in identical compositions. In both narratives, water is also imbued with an eerie power, and a shot of a water fountain tank crashing down a flight of stairs suggests nothing less than a disruption of society.

The children, and their relationship to their country via their surroundings, is what truly commands Qiu’s fascination. We hear the children singing a song in which they proclaim their loyalty to the Communist Children League of China, though one of them isn’t even aware of the concept of government. These two anecdotes suggest how unquestioningly we submit to higher forces, which elucidates the meaning of Qiu’s obsession with buildings that, via their function and aesthetic, command our lives on a subliminal level. And it’s the government that controls buildings, which are willed into existence by approvals, zoning permits, and designs that are also filtered through a variety of other discretionary bodies. In this context, the collapse of buildings suggest a perhaps necessary fissure in reality.

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Qiu is ambitious and talented, but Suburban Birds ultimately lacks the mythical-poetic gravity of, say, Stalker, which is an admittedly high bar for any film to clear. Despite the resonant symmetry of his imagery and the provocations of his themes, Qiu works hard for his effects, and his refusal to unify his various narratives feels self-consciously oblique. After a while, you may find yourself counting the clever symbols, reverberations, and crosscurrents, which pass us by like detritus in a river. The film’s refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional and eventually tiresome declaration of Qiu’s arthouse bona fides.

Score: 
 Cast: Mason Lee, Huang Lu, Gong Zihan, Deng Jing, Xiao Xiao, Wang Xinyu, Liu Mulligan, Qian Xuanyi, Xu Shuo  Director: Qiu Sheng  Screenwriter: Qiu Sheng  Distributor: Cinema Guild  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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