“The life that you are living now, does it seem normal to you?”
Will You Look at Me (Shuli Huang, China, 2022) opens with an existentialist question, inviting me to reflect on my own life as visuals of the night car-filled streets hypnotize us through slow frame rates and grainy, green-hued film. A few other questions follow, forcing us to look deeper into a mirror. Then, the director and narrator, Shuli Huang, proceeds to introduce us to his friends, all trying to find a place in the world after graduating. It almost feels like the beginning of another coming-of-age journey. However, this short documentary is more—it is an exercise of looking and its relations to identity.
Huang himself is the person behind the camera, specifically, the super 8mm/16mm film camera he bought after graduating from art school. In an age of digital cameras where film is costly and impractical, it becomes a question why this film was shot with film. Perhaps it is for the feeling of nostalgia, home, and the simpler past. Or to tell us we are witnessing something sacred, recorded with precise intention from a genuine enthusiasm to uncover revelations. To me, it acts as a perfect vessel for confronting a tension-charged situation, as the form can give the comfort of stepping into a memory: it gives the illusion of familiarity in impending havoc.
When Huang introduces Hong Yi, his long-term boyfriend, the film begins to tell us what it is about. The list of people he introduces stops at his mother. His narration and conversations with his mother make up the short documentary and the visuals are thereby there to enhance them. This audio narrative is never diegetic and often reads like theatrical poetry. The questions, declarations, screaming, crying, and musings between them, paired with visuals of his mother going about her day and his hometown in its ordinary hum, makes this documentary feel deeply personal.
In fact, it feels fitting to call it a personal diary of the filmmaker, one that would elicit guilt in me when watching due to its sacredness. Huang himself refers to it as a “personal essay.” Through the film’s play of at times matching and at others juxtaposing visuals and audio combinations, the film stirs specific emotions in us, emotions that distinctly belong to Shuli Huang.
Although constructed from a first-person perspective, the film is not cut and dried on what it says about the act of looking. To be looked at is to be viewed as a person, to be accepted, understood, and appreciated. Hence, Will You Look at Me is a son’s yearning for his mother to look at him in his truest colors. His queer identity has become a source of shame, guilt, and heartbreak to his mother, and addressing it would mean an exchange of painful conversations and uncomfortable emotions.
In addition, in English, the film’s Chinese title “Dang wo wang xiang ni de shi hou (当我望向你的时候)” means “When I look at you.” Put together with its English version, it reads: “When I look at you, will you look at me?” It further highlights Huang’s position as a subject. Not only is he the filmmaker from which the narrative’s perspective is taken, but also as a son who is actively seeking answers from his object, his mother who refuses to look at him.
At its core, Will You Look at Me is a film about a child searching for his mother’s acceptance and love and a mother refusing to look at him as he is (and in turn, refusing to look at herself as the mother who raised him). At this intersection of looking and queer identity are also cultural traditions and expectations parents often cling to, harming their relationship with their children. The Governance of China (2016) establishes family values and traditions as a central part of the nation’s foundation and China’s culture. One should always respect the elderly. Mother raises her children to be dutiful. Sons grow up to be respectable men and marry a virtuous women. Contradictions to these, such as sons who like boys, doom a family. They become an “other” to tradition.
Huang’s mother, for instance, antagonizes his queerness. A “monster”, she calls him. And what does being the mother of a monster make of her? The two exist in opposite spectrums, and because the lines crossed are grave but the love between them remains, the two suffer all the same. Despite being distinctly personal to its filmmaker, the documentary emphasizes the phenomena of broken parent-child relationships caused by the child’s LGBTQ identity and naturally, its implications on tradition and family. No matter how far one leaves their homeland, China, the Chinese Dream of working towards a family-centered society prevails.
For Huang, leaving his home country to study in a country opposite of his homeland almost seems like the perfect precondition of leaving behind the norms of his home country. Except, no new norms or traditions can make him any more queer than he already was. Interestingly, no matter how easy cutting the ties in this relationship might seem, there is a reason why despite the forthcoming pain and hurt, some children keep coming back to their parents seeking acceptance, as there is also a reason why despite the enduring pain waiting to erupt, some parents still welcome their children into their home and feed them. To describe a parent-child relationship as “complicated” means a perpetual search for its meaning.
The film captures this feeling of a ceaseless (and delusional) longing to mend a relationship between a queer child and their unsupportive parent. And as the film does not offer a cathartic conclusion, this feeling lingers and haunts. After all, the entire 20 minutes of the film is exactly that: a mosaic of painful and uncomfortable conversations and reflections enveloped in the illusion of nostalgia and still life that seems to never end.
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