‘Border’ San Sebastian Review: Ah Biao’s Stark Portrait of Loneliness and Desire

In a desolate city in northern China, where there seems to be little else besides a factory, a handful of houses, and a few cars, Luo Jia (Zheyan Li) lives and works for a mining company. He and his colleagues lead a rough, parched, largely wordless existence — a life that seems to consist of nothing but unchanging routine: work, food, sleep, and, every so often, an unexpected sexual encounter with a fellow miner that arrives in the most improbable of ways. His only escape from this grinding sameness comes through Su Qing (Feng Qi), a younger woman who occasionally waits for him outside the factory and with whom he spends what free time he has.

That, in broad strokes, is the life of the protagonist of Border, a bleak, desolate portrait of a lonely, frustrated worker. Much of the enigmatic power of this debut feature by Ah Biao lies in its mise-en-scène, which seems to fuse elements of Jia Zhangke and Aki Kaurismäki with the occasional Bressonian flourish. The long takes, the sparse dialogue, the impassive way the characters carry themselves — all of it inevitably recalls the Finnish director’s cinema, minus the humor that usually runs through his films. Or almost minus it: there are a few comic touches here too.

Indeed, the world these characters inhabit echoes a certain strand of Chinese cinema set deep in the country’s interior. Ah Biao, like Jia Zhangke, hails from Shanxi province, and the dusty towns of the film feel almost untouched by the transformations China has undergone in recent decades. Su Qing carries a few secrets the viewer will gradually uncover — and she’s not the only one. Another miner at the company, a colleague of Luo’s, enters the story as well, and we watch his even more solitary routine as his life slowly tangles with those of the other two.

Though set in China, Border is actually a Hong Kong–South Korean–American co-production. It’s likely to draw notice for the bluntness of some of its sexual content, which is fairly unusual for Chinese cinema. But beyond those surprising, curious scenes, this brief film — barely 78 minutes — is defined above all by its rigor, and by the clinical, detached gaze it casts on the lives of its two central characters, whose relationship grows steadily more tangled, and more mysterious, until it edges into something unsettling.

A curious outlier in the festival’s competition lineup, the film will likely split audiences between those who fall into step with its approach and those who can’t quite get inside the enigmatic, suggestive world the director builds. What’s beyond dispute is that Ah Biao has a distinctive cinematic eye and a command of mise-en-scène unusually assured for a first feature. With that control, he fashions an original portrait of two people who seem drawn to each other as the only possible refuge from lives too hard to bear alone.