WHITE RIVER – Review by Maitland McDonagh
Directed and co-written by first-time feature filmmaker Ma Xue, White River blows past the stereotype that female filmmakers are more interested in swoony romance than sex.
Pretty young Yan Fang (Yuan Tian) and her husband, Yuan Yong (Song Ningfeng), live in an undistinguished apartment building in Yanjiao–think, the Yonkers of Tokyo. Neither the world-famous city and nor one of its pricy suburbs; just a perfectly nice, if somewhat bland neighborhood set off by a river and filled with middle-class people going about their lives… some of which are more interesting than you might imagine. And the city is on lockdown, presumably because of Covid but maybe not, and honestly, it doesn’t really matter.
Though Yan Fang loves her husband, she’s more sexually adventurous than he is and takes up with a waiter (Xu Weihao) who works at a small local restaurant. Cue the tears and fireworks, you might think, but no–she’s able to broker a menage a trois with less trouble than one might imagine and really, that’s about it for plot. On the plus side, their amicable three-way affair affords ample opportunity for everyone to strip off and engage in fairly explicit but not-quite hardcore contortions. The unfortunate part is that, to be honest, the menage a trois is more than a little dull and, sadly, that’s because it’s all-but conflict free. At a certain point I found myself far more interested in why there’s a large poster on the wall of Russian tsarina Catherine the Great–whose sexual excesses were scandalous, even by the standards of royals unconstrained by conventional morality. You know, the one who was rumored to have died while trying to have carnal relations with a horse… a calumny that’s been debunked but which the sheer power of salaciousness remains in circulation, that and the fact that her appetites were sufficiently notorious that it wasn’t dismissed out of hand.
In any event, I’m honestly not sure whether or not White River’s lengthy and fairly explicit sex scenes are meant to be remarkably unerotic by way of robbing such sequences of their prurient appeal, but they’re conspicuously unarousing despite the attractiveness of all three actors. Beyond referring to the actual river that separates Yanjiao from Beijing, the title alludes to fact that Yanjiao is a “sleeping city,” a quiet suburb where nothing ever happens because everyone goes into Beijing to work and party then comes home and falls asleep, leaving the streets empty and quiet despite the inner turmoil of its residents.
