It’s easy enough to slap the #MeToo label on Nina Wu (2019) and call it a day. Yes, its titular heroine (a remarkable Wu Ke-Xi, also a co-writer) is an actress brutalized and exploited by a misogynist film industry, and the Taiwanese director, Midi Z, never pulls his punches. Yet this startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism.
An internet-famous livestreamer living alone in Taipei, Nina lands the lead role in a racy period thriller that will ultimately catapult her career. She warily consents to full-frontal nudity (she is constantly reminded that a true professional wouldn’t mind), and on set she is violently abused by a “mad genius” director hoping to draw out the most realistic performance by any means.
“They’re not only destroying my body, but my soul,” repeats our wobbly-eyed ingénue as the story jumps back and forth to her many auditions and takes. It’s a line from the movie-within-the-movie’s script, yet as the tight frame of the camera grips her face and relishes in her tortured emotions like a sadistic voyeur, her performance eventually becomes her truth.
Like Mulholland Drive, a clear touchstone, Nina Wu grows increasingly disjunctive as beguiling, eerily sensual incursions from a jealous rival rattle the actress. At the same time, cinematic illusion is rendered indistinguishable from reality with rug-pulling that feels genuinely shocking.
Traumatic experiences, after all, are no less intense because they’re caught on camera.
Crucially, Nina is never merely a symbol for the oppression of women, though she is a victim. In her red dress — the one she wears to her final, fateful audition — she’s just another actress, a number, a body. Yet she emerges as fully herself, scars and all, daring you to look away.
. . .