“Being close does not mean understanding. It means not leaving.”
— Emmanuel Lévinas
In the city of Changsha, the body of a young woman becomes a trench, an archive, a hostage. Lin Min is twenty-five years old, minus a few days, and for a long time has lived according to the inflexible rules of a disease that grants no respite: uremia, a silent erosion that demands constant, ritual, almost ascetic control over every element ingested, every drop, every gram. Her existence is organized around hospital centers, like a solar system built around the remote, almost mythical possibility of a transplant. Eight, nine years of waiting: an eternity compressed into a weekly schedule of dialysis and containment measures. For two years, Lin Min has been registered on two transplant lists in two different hospitals. Her body bears the marks of her condition: Hirudoid cream on her arms, marks from repeated needles and blood draws — perhaps 700, like Messi’s goals, a symbolic number that her ex-boyfriend had chosen as a marriage promise. But when that milestone was reached, he simply disappeared.
Then something happens. At night, in a moment when shame still has no voice, Lin Min records a message. She offers herself as a gift to a dying man: not only as a wife, but as a guardian of his surviving affections. In exchange: a kidney. Biology and ethics brush against each other in a dark negotiation. But once sent, the message finds eyes. Those of Luu Tu, a young wandering soul, marked by a glioblastoma — a cerebral noise looming over every gesture — and by an affective insistence that at times borders on the intolerable. He is funny, unpredictable, overwhelming. If his intracranial pressure rises, he faints. He works as a wedding videographer, tells delirious stories, and when he meets Lin Min something ignites. He starts following her everywhere, becoming a sort of amusing nightmare. Between them begins a clinical evaluation — stages to determine compatibility — but also a disorderly dance, a cohabitation between two exhausted yet strong bodies.
Director Han Yan does not shy away from the moral ambiguity of the plot; on the contrary, he exposes it head-on. His film is aware it rests on an unstable framework, yet does not try to stabilize it with rhetoric. Instead, it shows the cracks and questions its hold. The law, with its regulatory function, appears as a necessary specter: organs cannot be bartered like promises of love. Yet what the film seeks is not so much verisimilitude as the echo of a real, unrepresentable, deeply human need.
The relationship between the two protagonists evolves through awkward, unequal, never neutral gestures. When Luu Tu not only helps Lin Min move but takes full responsibility for the move itself, the film deliberately derails: what was a clinical negotiation becomes a sketch of intimacy. Luu Tu reveals himself to be extremely sensitive, capable of empathy despite his eccentricities. And Luu Tu’s mother, a crazy and hilarious figure, adds a surreal element to their fragile, grotesque yet sincere alliance. Together they become companions in illness, and in a memorable scene — the walkie-Tolkien conversation — words become incredibly light, heartbreaking, absurd. Unique.
But this is not canonical romance: it is a jagged construction, lacking a recognizable grammar, resembling more a cohabitation of pains than a meeting of souls. Luu Tu finally proposes marriage to her to “continue living in her,” as if the other’s body could become a form of permanence, an extreme solution to impermanence.
Han Yan’s visual and narrative language does not seek subtlety. Sometimes it hits hard, as in the scene where a child repeats in English that he lives in a “perfect city,” while Lin Min faces eviction and the humiliation of precariousness. It is a direction that uses irony as a shield and empathy as a trap. Yet, amid all this, emerges a strange, dissonant lightness: the dynamic between Lin Min and Luu Tu brushes the territories of romantic comedy but as if revealing its tragic skeleton, as if every smile is earned at the cost of inner surrender.
Supporting this fragile framework is Li Gengxi, who inhabits the character without wanting to “act.” Her face, often left bare, traverses the fatigue of living without filters and manages to embody an ordinary girl — despite everything, through everything. She is a withdrawn presence, communicating mainly through emptiness, silence, and glances. Beside her, Peng Yuchang offers a dazed but never caricatural counterpoint: his eccentricity is not madness, but a survival strategy, a way to negotiate with the idea of the end itself.
The film closes with real images — the faces of the real Lin Min and Luu Tu — and this return to reality acts as a short circuit. Fiction, with all its ellipses and exaggerations, had already said more. Yet that documentary fragment reminds us that this story, however uneven, arises from a real urgency, seeking no justification. Only listening.
“In certain bonds, we do not save ourselves. But we resist together.”
— Christian Bobin
