‘We Girls’ review: Feng Xiaogang and Zhao Liying unite for teary ex-con drama

Dir. Feng Xiaogang. China. 2025. 124mins

In China, feminine ex-prisoners discover their skill to reintegrate into society hindered by social stigma and scant employment prospects, society typically viewing them with suspicion. These hurdles are dramatised in We Women, which finds perennial hitmaker Feng Xiaogang oscillating between harsh realism and a sentimental celebration of sisterhood, typically inside the similar scene.

Gives a compassionate perspective on a marginalised group.

Marketed as a star car for Zhao Liying and capitalsing on her tv fame and massive display success in 2024’s Article 20, Tiger Wolf Rabbit and The Unseen Sister,  We Women is definitely a two-header with Lan Xiya as a pair of ex-convicts striving to attain their goals of a greater future. It’s their feisty chemistry that powers We Women by its much less believable stretches.

We Women opened domestically in the course of the Qingming Pageant, taking an estimated $10.8m; a good return provided that China’s theatrical market stays in an total droop regardless of receiving a lift from the Lunar New 12 months interval. This may nonetheless rely as a modest success for Feng (Huge Shot’s Funeral, and so forth) whose latest output – honest tearjerker Solely Cloud Is aware of (2019) and sequence finale If You’re the One 3 (2023) – has didn’t set the field workplace alight. Internationally, the director’s profile stays diametrically against his family title standing at house, however We Women is the form of nonstop emotional rollercoaster that ought to appeal to viewers on streaming.

Set in the course of the 2010s, it begins behind bars with Gao Yuexiang (Zhao) doing time for taking part within the on-line intercourse trade. In a position to make use of signal language as a result of her daughter is listening to impaired, Gao takes deaf mute inmate Mao Amei (Lan) below her wing and friendship blossoms. Upon launch, they initially go their separate methods. Gao needs to reclaim her daughter who’s being raised in an orphanage, whereas Mao is supposed to return to the crime syndicate that skilled her to be an particularly nimble thief. 

Decided to lift the funds wanted to offer her daughter with a steady handle and a cochlear implant, Gao throws herself into service work however quickly encounters prejudice. In the meantime, Mao avoids returning to the exploitative clutches of snakelike underworld boss Lao Die (Qian Yi) however resorts to begging resulting from missing an id card. But destiny quickly reunites them. Pooling their meagre assets, they lease low cost lodging and set about bettering their funds by menial jobs and opportunistic schemes.

Though celebrated for ribbing China’s ever-changing social material with crowd-pleasing comedies, Feng is a classy filmmaker who successfully integrated first-person perspective in his anti-war epic Meeting (2007) and cleverly utilised round framing to evoke bureaucratic restriction in I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016). Befitting its subject material, We Women evinces a tough and prepared aesthetic with cinematographer Florian Zinke largely favouring handheld camerawork. This provides an observational high quality to the jail prologue that’s solely damaged by colourfully lit, slickly introduced flashbacks juxtaposing the lure of fast cash with its drab penalties. It additionally serves sudden shifts in temper, because the transitory nature of Gao and Mao’s job alternatives locations them in tight spots: a scene wherein an association with a beverage promoter goes south unnervingly illustrates the knife edge that these girls live on.

We Women is as a lot in regards to the rigours and expectations of China’s legal rehabilitation course of as it’s in regards to the particular person wrestle to reform. This technique is embodied by devoted jail case officer Deng Hong (Chuo Ni) who’s sympathetic to Gao and Mao to the extent that she assists them on the skin. Nonetheless, she practices a tricky love strategy that reveals restricted tolerance for slip-ups and maintains a way of hierarchy. As such, there’s a sense that Gao and Mao indefinitely exist in-between the worlds of jail and true freedom, with shabby environment emphasising this. (Gao sleeps in a dormitory when briefly employed as a lodge cleaner, whereas her residence with Mao is in a condemned constructing.) Furthermore, Gao’s continued ethical flexibility in the direction of acquiring cash threatens to setback any optimistic growth.

Feng and co-screenwriter Chong An posit that China’s advanced society options quite a few unconventional household models (the movie’s Chinese language title of ’Sunflowers’ refers to a jail theatre troupe which bonds by efficiency). This theme is most affectingly conveyed by the central dynamic between Gao and Mao, which convincingly evolves from mother-daughter to selfless partnership. Zhao and Lan are equally spectacular, with the latter’s endearing cheekiness enjoying off the previous’s suppressed frustration. If the lurches into melodrama will be attempting and the contrivances exhausting to purchase (Gao and Mao getting launched on the identical day is the primary of many handy turns), We Women nonetheless offers a compassionate perspective on a marginalised group.