“Sis, honesty is overrated,” a co-worker tells Lei (Cuishan Liang) in “Big Little Things,” as she looks over a grad school application that may be inflating the truth. An advisor to students on where they should apply that may be the best fit including abroad from her native China, the only slightly older Lei might not be comfortable pushing forward a resume she knows to be stretching the truth, but it’s something she’s actively weighing in her own life when the holidays are coming and she is set to return home to her family, loathe to reveal that her roommate is Li Bei (Jialing Sun) is actually her lover, should she bring her and considers taking a man instead to appease her mother Chunli (Ling Hu). In Michelle Zhou’s modest yet affecting drama, the lies inevitably lead to more trouble than they’re worth, but how casually they’re a part of a culture that often avoids confrontation is of even greater intrigue.
It isn’t something only Li Bei has heard before when Lei tells her she’s just waiting for “the right time” to come out of the closet as the college adviser hatches a plan akin to “The Wedding Banquet” in which she recruits Yao (Bin Yu), an aspiring furniture designer who she meets at work when he wants to apply to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. Hearing of his history and reasons for moving away from the mainland, she’s convinced he might make a suitable partner for a weekend when he’d understand what she’s facing back home. However, where “Big Little Things” starts to compel is when Yao’s reasons for agreeing to play her beard start to appear as much to his benefit as hers when being in the company of her family can actually help clarify what he hopes his own future could look like. Li Bei is left out in the cold quite literally by this arrangement, spending her winter break alone when she’s long distanced herself from her own father and left to wonder what’s going on with Lei when she’s too busy to answer her phone.
Although Zhou’s debut is geared towards the young with a vibrant color palette and angst about the future to spare, the director may surprise with how generous she is towards the older generation when there is as much concern around Chunli as Lei, who may have misread exactly why her mother would be so against her committed to an unconventional relationship of any kind. Still, she’s done a lot of reading at this point when her mother regularly sends letters pouring her heart out when she doesn’t feel like she can talk to her husband Deli (Hai Yu) and she gave up long ago on trying to get him to behave, from an annoying cigarette habit to being more talkative when they have guests, let alone her, with only her daughter around to absorb her bitterness. (Notably, she brightens with the presence of Yao less because he could be a partner for Lei than he offers some rare help for her in the kitchen during a holiday in which she feels all alone.)
All this takes a little more time than it should when the pace of the drama doesn’t always keep up with the invigorated visual aesthetic that Zhou works in, full of evocative colors and sly camera pans around the room with a shifting focus on whichever character is feeling things most intensely. But the observation extends from the sharp camerawork of cinematographer Hark Xu to the filmmaker’s sensitive script that refuses to dismiss any of the characters’ concerns, no matter how ill-considered they can be, and assumptions about what the others want can often backfire when they themselves don’t have a strong idea about what that is. Part of that is universal restlessness around a certain age, but Zhou also suggests some of it can be attributed to a generational shift in China where the young may have more freedom than the last and upholding past standards has become a form of resentment, leading to a conflict that may be relatively timeless yet comes across here as particularly attuned to this moment.
“Big Little Things” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 12th at 2 pm at PalaBiennale.