In a landscape smothered in snow, where functional, harshly lit mid-20th Century buildings perch incongruously by deserted roadsides, where every other person seems consumed by the grinding demand of mere subsistence in such a frigid place, in whom does one find connection? And how, when one is at a fundamental disconnect from the world around oneself? To be young, queer and disabled, existing within the strictures of administrative systems — healthcare, housing, immigration — can such connections even be forged and, if so, will they even last?
Ashley McKenzie’s second feature, Queens of the Qing Dynasty, develops further her interest in elucidating the experiences of people on the fringes of Canadian society with admirable verve but, ultimately, with frustratingly little insight. Star (Sarah Walker) is a suicidal, disabled 18-year-old whose recent history has been a series of mental health spirals finally leading to hospitalization. An (Ziyin Zheng) is a student immigrant from Shanghai and a volunteer in her hospital, assigned both to monitor Star during the night and to provide her company. Neither fits in within this little corner of the world, where most folk are too busy just getting by on their own terms to consider that their own terms might not accommodate people like Star and An – “others” both gifted and blighted with qualities that set them at an innate difference from the society that controls and restricts them.
A friendship blossoms between the pair, a unique bond born out of simple tolerance. As too many queer, disabled or immigrant people will attest to, merely meeting someone who accepts you as you are and understands your nature can be a profound experience. These two confide in one another, sharing their interests and fascinations, their traumatic histories and hopeful futures, their wicked, caustic sense of humor jolting through the ostensible misery of their daily lives. Star is initially confined to uncomfortable beds in windowless hospital rooms, forced to endure impersonal treatments and check-ups at any and all hours of the day and night; through An’s determination to provide solace to another lonely soul, she begins to envisage a life with horizons far away from the chilly entrapment of her current existence.
“I’m expiring,” she frequently claims, feeling her tortured time on Earth to be drawing to a close, expressing her feeling via characteristically brusque humor. An tells Star that he doesn’t expect to pass the Canadian government’s test determining whether or not to grant him leave to remain. “You’re expiring too,” she tells him. Uncertainty and, likely, further difficulty awaits both of our protagonists, an uncertainty whose inherent discomfort is assuaged once shared with another’s. Compassion – from Latin, “to suffer with.” Queens of the Qing Dynasty is an intrinsically compassionate movie, both depicting compassion and, in its favorable depiction, advocating it.
It’s also a tricky movie. McKenzie paints her picture in slow strokes, immersing the viewer in highly evocative tableaux, capturing the precise feel of a given moment or environment with keen awareness of the emotional impact of light, sound and time. She eschews conventional narrative shorthand techniques like establishing shots or contextualizing dialogue, preferring instead to allow temporal ellipses to occur casually. Yet Queens of the Qing Dynasty isn’t exactly an abstract movie – it’s quite straightforward and the little quirks McKenzie peppers throughout are, if anything, more expressive than impressive. A vivid, jarring electronic soundtrack by Cecile Believe and Yu Su overlays many sequences, at once adding sonic texture and suggesting a certain mental and emotional dissonance between Star’s internal, lived reality and that which the camera can otherwise document.
McKenzie enjoys some success with these techniques but the movie beneath them, while enlivened by them, isn’t quite improved by them. Walker excels at building a character who seems, at any and every moment, capable of turning down any and every path available to her, yet Queens of the Qing Dynasty doesn’t possess the same idiosyncratic adventurousness. Over its runtime, McKenzie appears ever more content to simply observe her characters, rather than guide them or to facilitate any substantial shift in how she observes them. Past the opening 30 minutes or so, it becomes a disappointingly passive movie with few fresh ideas and oddly little to comment upon. It opens with promise but closes without having delivered on much of that promise, in the end a distinctly ordinary portrait of two decidedly unordinary people.
Photo courtesy of Factory 25
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