Big Little Things

A queer-themed family psychodrama which takes place over the Chinese New Year holidays, Big Little Things features plenty of fireworks, most of them emotional. Building on a decade of shorts and TV work, US-based Chinese writer-director Michelle Zhou’s debut feature is a personal passion project with strongly autobiographical echoes. It is also a quietly lovely piece of work, humane and heartfelt, boasting fine performances and impressively strong aesthetics for such a low-budget indie production. Fresh from its world premiere in the Orrizonti sidebar in Venice, it will likely pick up slots at LGBT festivals, but should appeal to more general audiences too.

Xiao Lei (Cuishan Liang) and Li Bei (Jialing Sun) are a young lesbian couple sharing a Beijing apartment. Their sexuality is not exactly a secret, but this is socially conservative China, so they mostly play it safe by shielding their relationship from casual friends and co-workers. In a source of mounting irritation for Li Bei, Xiao Lei has also not yet come out to her parents, fearing the explosive reaction of her overbearing mother Ling Hu (Wi Chunli), whose dearest wish is for her only daughter to find a nice man, get married and start a family.

With New Year looming, Xiao Lei makes plans to visit her parents in Harbin, a city in north-east China close to the Russian border, which is famous for its icy winters. Adding insult to injury, she She does not invite Li Bei but instead recruits a casual male acquaintance, Yao (Bin Yu), to come home and role-play as her boyfriend. While this awkward gathering is unfolding, Li Bei becomes increasingly angry over her erasure from the story, eventually setting off to Harbin to force a truth-telling showdown with Xiao Lei’s family.

Little Big Things is a closely autobiographical story for Zhou. The plot was inspired by a similar real-life case of deception, shock revelation and family rupture which happened to her and her partner, Chun Yu, who is also the film’s main producer. Adding an extra meta dimension, Yu’s actual father, Bin Yu, plays the father of her screen alter ego. In her Venice notes, Zhou pitches the film as a cathartic healing process, a “dialogue through cinema” to help resolve lingering generational friction.

Zhou could have played this familiar clashing-values coming-out plot for maximum socially awkward comedy, as seen in thematically similar films like Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993), Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) and Clea DuVall’s Happiest Season (2020). But instead she lays out these events with sombre restraint, a non-judgmental tone and a generous degree of compassion for all her characters. Even Ling Hu, ostensibly the villain of the piece, is a study in quiet desperation and profound loneliness.

In an extra culturally specific twist, Xiao Lei and her father have roots in southern China, switching between Mandarin and Cantonese at times, which isolates the monolingual Ling Hu further. The film’s subtly invoked setting is the early 2020s, shortly after pandemic lockdowns lifted, when long-separated families could finally meet up again, which reinforces this underlying theme of lost human connection.

Big Little Things is a minor-key chamber drama, but it still fills a big screen with emotional pyrotechnics and eye-catching visuals. Zhou and her cinematographer Hark Xu consistently turn tiny details into lyrical moments, doing imaginative work with silhouettes, reflections, neon colour busts and fuzzy focus fields. Rarely seen on western cinema screens, Harbin is another strong selling point. Framed as a painterly collage of icy streets and deserted snowscapes, the city comes to feel like a giant metaphor for the deep-frozen tensions that crackle between the story’s conflicted protagonists. There may be a subtle cautionary message here about social conformity and conservative values being a surefire recipe for misery, but Zhou is not pushing any militant queer manifesto in this tender, bittersweet story about the harm caused by the secrets and lies we tell others, and ourselves.

Director, screenwriter: Michelle Zhou
Cast: Cuishan Liang, Jialing Sun, Bin Yu, Ling Hu, Hai Yu
Cinematographer: Hark Xu
Editor: Xinzhu Liu
Music: Gang Yu
Producers: Chun Yu, Michelle Zhou, Junjie Zhai, Clarissa Zhang
Production: Three Dots Films (US), Snow Island Pictures (Hong Kong)
World sales: Moebius Entertainment, Hong Kong
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In Mandarin, Cantonese
109 minutes