This Woman

"The Chinese independent filmmaker Alan Zhang’s first feature, “This Woman,” is a startlingly intimate and alluringly intricate tangle of fiction and faux documentary. It stars Hihi Lee (who also co-wrote the script) as Beibei, a young striver of the Beijing bourgeoisie, a married mother of a toddler who is emotionally involved with a colleague from her job in a real-estate office, leading to threats from the colleague’s wife. But as Beibei’s romantic commitments and professional activities move from city to city, her very identity—amid tension with her husband and her widowed mother—seems to shift. Focussing on high-stakes conflicts of love and money, noting the constraints of tradition and bureaucracy, Zhang views her protagonist (who is interviewed on-camera) as a free-range prisoner in every scenario." -Richard Brody (The New Yorker)