SDAFF ’24: Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts + Stranger

BEN AND SUZANNE: A REUNION IN 4 PARTS
***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Anastasia Olowin
written and directed by Shaun Seneviratne

STRANGER
局外⼈
**½/****
starring Jin Jing, Liguo Yuan, Baohe Xue
written and directed by Zhengfan Yang

by Walter Chaw There’s a sense of suspension in hotel rooms, a weight accrued from the parade of temporary occupants, somehow–cosmic luggage left behind. There’s possibility in hotel rooms. You can be who you want to be and someone else will clean up after you, make it seem like you were never really there, prime the pump for the next in line. There’s freedom in that, and threat, too, a practical reminder that you are temporary and once you have gone, the world will, by design, rush to fill the space you abandoned. Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts begins in a guest suite and ends in a series of hotel rooms as nebbish Ben (Sathya Sridharan) visits his girlfriend Suzanne (Anastasia Olowin), who’s away on a three-month business trip in Sri Lanka. She works for a program that’s ostensibly for the development of small, women-run companies, but lately it’s devolved into the odious task of collecting loans for the bank. “I only went to the bank because of you,” says one of Suzanne’s clients as she’s asking for more time to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, and I thought of Darth Vader on Cloud City telling Lando to pray he doesn’t alter the terms of their agreement further. Suzanne’s task, already ugly, is made uglier by the fact that she’s a white woman and all of the women who trusted her are brown. This isn’t what the film is about, though in time you realize it’s at the base of what everything’s about.

Ben is lonesome and needy and Suzanne is distracted. Their time apart (a month?) has allowed her to adopt a few new–some would say appropriative–habits: veganism and a judgmental teetotalism as well as a sudden modesty in refusing to share a room with her partner, lest she give her boss the idea that she’s premaritally active. Ben makes a pass at her immediately, and she tells him she has to want it first. I was pretty sure I knew what kind of movie this was going to be, but then it’s not. Ben has a vacation planned for them, which Suzanne rolls into a work trip. She’s on her phone and her laptop a lot but gradually starts to thaw, and they spend a day trying to find a morning-after pill in a country without a Walgreens on every corner. I liked Ben and Suzanne quite a bit; they have a natural chemistry, and while they are equally idiosyncratic and narcissistic, they’re believably so.

They know it, in other words–they know they’re irritating and looking for an identity into their thirties. It’s probably why they’re so stupid sometimes. Ben wants Suzanne to orbit him; Suzanne wants a culture she can defend. Their mutual attraction is at the root of what they perceive they lack: Ben wants someone to validate his value, while Suzanne wants something to validate hers. In the middle of all that, there’s a search for a copy of Starship Troopers and a bout with explosive diarrhea. Although the references to an empire gone mad are not subtle, the thrust of Ben and Suzanne is how an interracial relationship can serve as a metaphor for that which is reconcilable between alien cultures (fetishism) and that which never will be (histories of oppression and exploitation). That none of it comes off as didactic speaks to Seneviratne’s light touch around explosive elements. I didn’t mind the time I spent with Ben and Suzanne. I hope they’re doing okay.

Zhengfen Yang’s Stranger is another film set in hotels, structured around a series of vignettes in which the rooms’ occupants play out Chinese and international concerns through the microcosm of their interpersonal, often deadpan, immolations. It reminds me most of Roy Andersson’s films, although I don’t quite vibe with the humour here, such as it is–maybe Jim Jarmusch’s scrappy roundelay sideshows in how Stranger feels self-consciously wry. “Smug” is the term I’m trying to avoid, but it keeps surfacing, especially in a sequence involving a woman quarantined for COVID under China’s stringent isolation policies early in the pandemic. If we are all strangers in hotel rooms and also while wearing masks, well, here’s the segment of the film called “Stranger” involving a person in a hotel room wearing a mask. Better is the sequence where a woman wishing to give birth to her child in the United States practices being interrogated by an immigration agent while wearing a moisturizing mask that looks very much like a layer of skin peeling away as she reveals her artifice.

But what to make of the sequence where two men are raided by faceless police demanding they answer questions never really asked and provide papers that don’t tell the story of why they’re in trouble? “I have the right to remain silent,” says one. The female cop responds, “That’s in the United States. You’re in China.” But where is this hotel room? This suggests China, but why would someone ask for Fifth Amendment rights in China? Is Zhengfen offering up some sort of veiled protest? It feels Kafkaesque, this interview without a goal, this detention without cause, this guilt without crime. Stranger illustrates a cultural divide, yes, but more to the point an intra-cultural divide between classes–between a government committed to control and a populace at various stages of revolution, both subtle and overt.

Consider the first segment involving a maid moonlighting as a flight attendant who changes uniforms to perform one duty in her room before preparing to do her other duty outside of it. Or the influencer/blogger who gives a solitary tour of her empty hotel room to an unseen audience that’s prodding her for more and more access to personal spaces. They’re not content with the closet or the bed, so she mounts her phone on the bathtub and gets in, dry and fully clothed, surrounded by a glass enclosure and genuflecting to the natural light shafting in through a high window. It’s a religious image, the penitent in a cathedral. A penal image, too, of a prisoner pining for the sky. Stranger suggests we are both at once, cribbing a page from Jacques Tati in telling the story of our lives in the rat’s mazes and glass vivariums we construct for ourselves. The picture isn’t elegant enough to elevate itself above mere exercise, alas, but it’s a pleasant thought experiment matched to carefully organized tableaux vivant: Edith Wharton for the People’s Republic.