In early 2020, first-time Chinese director Zhèng Lù Xīnyuán 郑陆心源 rose to sudden fame. Her feature debut, The Cloud in Her Room — an art house feature about a young Chinese woman’s quarter-life crisis — won the prestigious Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. This year, she returns to the festival scene with her second film, Jet Lag. It documents the jet-lagged, pandemic-era journey of the director and her partner from Austria to China in early 2020, but is also intermingled with an earlier family trip to Myanmar in a deeply personal reflection on family, intimacy, and home.
“A very personal essay film that I try to write through the visuals” is how the director describes the documentary. Mixing together visual materials — old photos, home movies, travelogue recordings, archive videos, CCTV tapes, and protest footage — Zheng Lu (she uses a double-barreled surname) crafts a formally fascinating memoir film. The title not only refers to the time difference between two continents, but also stands as a metaphor for the detached relationships in the director’s family.
The journey begins in Graz, Austria, in early 2020 as Zheng Lu and her girlfriend, Zoe, decide to fly back to China during lockdown. When it comes to China and the COVID-19 pandemic, Zheng Lu isn’t interested in the overtly political. Instead, she offers a more quotidian take on her experience in the quarantine hotel upon returning to her home country. A shot in which she repeatedly lifts her leg as an exercise while lying down on her side, like a pendulum marking the passage of time, is utterly mundane but will resonate with anyone who has been through quarantine.
The physical isolation of the director’s containment also mirrors her psychological and emotional distance from her family. “Making this film is an attempt for me to actually get close to my family and, in a way, to test our real knowledge about each other,” said Zheng Lu.
Family is the focus of the second journey in the film, which consists of footage from Zheng Lu and her family’s 2018 trip to Myanmar, in search of the legacy of a long-lost patriarch. These digital videotapes center on Zheng Lu’s grandmother, whose father went to Myanmar in the 1940s, became a monk, and never returned to China.
Jet Lag is personal and explicit, but it’s not intimate. The film lays bare the most private moments of Zheng Lu and her partner’s life, including plenty of nude scenes on the bed, in a bathtub, and on the sunlit floor. But it doesn’t do enough to expose what’s beyond the skin, so to speak. In several scenes showing a sort of group therapy, Zoe and her friends share with one another their journal entries in English. But the resulting conversations that reveal personal traumas in a self-aware fashion fall short of eliciting pathos.
While interweaving these personal and familial stories throughout, Zheng Lu adds a political side to the documentary toward its end. In a video call between the director and her distant relative in Myanmar, the early 2021 protests in Myanmar following a military coup are explained. Zheng Lu’s motive is to “get the word out online,” but the inclusion of this part remains a peculiar choice within the film’s already loose set of themes.
Just the way funding for The Hotel and Stonewalling — two other Chinese-language films from this year that toured festivals globally — came from outside China, Jet Lag is a Swiss-Austrian co-production. Official distribution in China is highly unlikely given the director’s penchant for nudity in her works, as well as the discussion and footage of a pro-democracy protest in the film.
At this year’s Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France (devoted to the cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America), the documentary received a Special Mention. This festival has played a crucial role in introducing Chinese-language films to the rest of the world, ever since awarding its top prize to Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei in 1984.
“I don’t have a strong message to deliver,” Zheng Lu said about her first film. “But I have a moment to share.” That remains true for Jet Lag. Whether a viewer will appreciate the film depends in part on how deeply they are invested in the personal moments and feelings the director wishes to share. Viewers who felt that The Cloud in Her Room risked becoming an exercise in navel gazing will likely find Jet Lag interminable. But those who admired the fractured narrative and powerfully evocative visuals of the former will appreciate this even more personal film all the better for it.
Zheng Lu stands by her conviction: “Artists always work on figuring out who we are no matter what day or age. Creation requires self-exploration.”
