Queena Li’s Bipolar embraces the quirky uncertainties and randomness of a road movie like few other recent films. Initially, the jarring jumps in logic and time make the high contrast black-and-white odyssey feel occasionally incoherent. As one character aptly puts it, “plans are undependable,” and nearly every scene feels like it’s slipping between absurdist reality and a lucid dream state. But the stream-of-consciousness style matches the vulnerable psychological mindset of a protagonist reeling from emotional trauma.
Kun (Leah Dou) arrives in Lhasa, Tibet to cleanse her tortured soul by way of religious pilgrimage. A musician of some renown, she’s given the rock star treatment. Still, all the access and alcohol in the world can’t mend a broken spirit, so she naturally begins to wander through hotel corridors and banquet halls looking for a distraction. Instead, she finds a purpose: saving the mythical rainbow lobster that has...
Kun (Leah Dou) arrives in Lhasa, Tibet to cleanse her tortured soul by way of religious pilgrimage. A musician of some renown, she’s given the rock star treatment. Still, all the access and alcohol in the world can’t mend a broken spirit, so she naturally begins to wander through hotel corridors and banquet halls looking for a distraction. Instead, she finds a purpose: saving the mythical rainbow lobster that has...
- 4/28/2021
- by Glenn Heath Jr.
- The Film Stage
Leah Dou navigates through Tibet in a journey of liminal boundaries, between dreams and the past, in a fable of a psychedelic touch.
Bipolar is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
A young woman in a phone booth and an inaudible conversation that seems to go nowhere. The news bring pain, the body starts to shiver. As she cringes, the memories take over the picture. A shadow drifting underwater of the shimmering monochromes of a swimming pool. That’s the protagonist (Leah Dou in a seemingly autobiographical role), captured between liminal boundaries, these of dreams, traumas, and reality. She’s just about to go on a life-changing pilgrimage. Starting in Lhasa, Tibet, with a vague plan in her hand, she hops onto a car to reconcile with her past. Every road-movie needs a companion, a buddy to lean on. Here? An ambiguous, supposedly holy lobster that tinkles with psychedelic liquid.
Bipolar is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
A young woman in a phone booth and an inaudible conversation that seems to go nowhere. The news bring pain, the body starts to shiver. As she cringes, the memories take over the picture. A shadow drifting underwater of the shimmering monochromes of a swimming pool. That’s the protagonist (Leah Dou in a seemingly autobiographical role), captured between liminal boundaries, these of dreams, traumas, and reality. She’s just about to go on a life-changing pilgrimage. Starting in Lhasa, Tibet, with a vague plan in her hand, she hops onto a car to reconcile with her past. Every road-movie needs a companion, a buddy to lean on. Here? An ambiguous, supposedly holy lobster that tinkles with psychedelic liquid.
- 2/14/2021
- by Lukasz Mankowski
- AsianMoviePulse
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