LE MONDE'S OPINION - WHY NOT

From one week to another, from one China to another. On Wednesday, April 2, Wang Bing, director of the 2002 masterpiece West of the Tracks (an elegy to Chinese deindustrialization), presented the second installment of Youth (Hard Times). This documentary trilogy is dedicated to the contemporary servitude of young textile workers in the Shanghai region. Wang Bing, 57, undeniably one of the greatest living documentary filmmakers, can no longer reside in his country, where his work, which portrays a particular Chinese reality, has never been welcomed. A thousand miles away - yet so close - at the very heart of Shanghai, 34-year-old director Yihui Shao paints a different world with different customs in her film Her Story. A romantic comedy and feminist blockbuster, it was released on November 22, 2024, in China, and has since shattered the box office with 17 million tickets sold.

Born in the Shanxi region and trained at the Beijing Film Academy before recently settling in Shanghai, Shao is not a novice. In 2021, she had already made a significant impact on the national box office with B for Busy (not distributed in France), which featured a charming divorced painting teacher drifting romantically between three women. For Her Story, Shao skillfully retained the dominant features that contributed to the success of her previous film, including the dialogue, which is nearly all in the Shanghainese dialect. Filming was done in the gentrified, former French colonial quarter, highlighting the cosmopolitan and modern nature of the city that has always culturally and politically distinguished itself from Beijing's austerity. This is not a new phenomenon, as already demonstrated with the opposing hapai and jingpai movements in literature.

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