Does COVID have you down? Are you craving a vacation to regroup and rehabilitate? Have you considered dropping everything and making a haphazard run to a tropical location? Well, if you want to do so vicariously, look no further than Stacy Chu’s ¡Llamamé Chinita!, a breathtaking short that follows main character Lulu on a trip that will change her life. The film will be available for streaming worldwide on Friday, February 11 through the New Jersey Film Festival.
Lulu is a fish out of water on a journey of self discovery. The film opens with a missed call from her frazzled mother home in China, and a gorgeous tourist location in what we soon learn to be Baja California. Lulu never picks up the call, and instead cautiously surveys her surroundings, held back from fully immersing herself in the beautiful setting because of how impulsively she fled and how her guilt is directly tied to the many people blowing up her phone. The film’s title - ¡Llamamé Chinita! - implies exactly that: Call me, Chinese girl!
Throughout the film, our heroine is berated with calls from her family, friends, and employers, the most notable being her mother. It seems that every moment of her journey is interrupted by a phone call from home, urging her to follow the straight and narrow, settle down, work more, and give in to the societal pressures she is attempting to evade by running away. She can’t even escape the pressure in sleep, where she is woken up by numerous notifications before exasperatedly turning her phone off. These insurmountable demands from everyone in her life - particularly her mother - could inform why Lulu is not only tightly wound at the beginning of the film, but why she seems to shrink herself down.
This notion is supported by Chu’s thoughtful direction, where she employs impactful framing to make Lulu appear small in the new world that she is visiting. Two of my favorite shots from the film do just that. In one, Lulu fades into the crowd on a busy street, so much so that I started looking at other pedestrians more than the protagonist; in the other, Lulu sits on the balcony of her hotel room, looking like a tiny, flightless bird nestled in the bottom left corner of the screen.
Yet against all odds, Lulu progressively starts to shed the fear and guilt associated with the life she left behind. By forcefully closing a car door, she metaphorically ends a conversation her mother is trying to have about her future, childbearing, and desirability to men. By slowly attempting to learn Spanish, Lulu is gaining agency over herself and her spontaneous decision to run away.
In fact, Lulu’s voice becomes a very important marker of her character’s development. As the film progresses and Lulu continues to shed her responsibilities in favor of her own happiness, we finally hear her voice. It begins with her struggling to learn and understand Spanish, and culminates with her yelling at two boys who stole her clothes and phone while she was at the beach. This outburst was the exact cathartic release of steam that the character needed to feel settled in her decision to leave China. Her phone, the constant reminder of her duties to work and family and incessant barrage of selfish phone calls, was fatefully removed from her life. It’s as though the hand of God nudged the boys into her path so she could finally rid herself of the unbearable weight on her shoulders.
This concept works beautifully with the preceding scene, which shows Lulu turning off her phone after receiving a text from her mom about freezing her eggs, and leaving behind an uncomfortable bathing suit to swim naked in the water of a private beach. In this moment, she experiences the truest freedom we’ve seen of her yet. As a result of this crux on her path to happiness, she chooses to speak up for herself when she realizes her things had been stolen, and recognizes the freedom the boys had given her by taking her phone away. In the final moments of the film, Lulu buys herself a red dress, more vibrant than anything she had worn throughout the rest of the film, and looks around her with a settled sense of freedom.
The trip to Baja California acted as a test for Lulu. By proving that she could live independently, find joy in discomfort, and fully avoid the obligations holding her hostage, she recognizes that the only person she needs to “call” and appease is herself. Don’t miss your chance to watch ¡Llamamé Chinita! and other featured shorts on Friday, February 11 through the New Jersey Film Festival.
¡Llamamé Chinita! screens at the Spring 2022 New Jersey Film Festival on February 11. To buy tickets click here.
The New Jersey Film Festival Spring 2022 will be taking place on select Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through February 20, 2022. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. More info is available here: https://newjerseyfilmfestivalspring2022.eventive.org/welcome
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