The Princess of Nebraska

I should have walked out of this film, but I stayed, hoping that it'd get better. It didn't. In fact the longer it went on, the worse it became. The story line (did I say story line?), is as thin as cigarette smoke. The lead character is obnoxious and monosyllabic. Nobody else in the film was either pleasant or of interest. The camera work was hand-held and jerky when it didn't need to be. The shots were so 'tight', the viewer is denied any sense of 'place'. No scene followed logically from the previous one. The ending was so totally incomprehensible, it demonstrated that the director had completely run out of ideas. The moral dilemma at the heart of the film was neither articulated or resolved. Wayne Wang has made some interesting features. "The Princess From Nebraska" is not one of them.

The pregnant Sasha (Li Ling) travels from Nebraska to San Francisco, California, expecting to sell her baby and she meets her gay friend Boshen (Brian Danforth), who had been the lover of the musician Yang that got Sasha pregnant in Beijing. Sasha befriends the party girl X (Pamelyn Chee) that invites her to attend a party with old men.

It is hard to write a summary of the pointless, boring and uninteresting "The Princess of Nebraska" since there is no storyline, just a complete mess with an unpleasant character. There is no continuity between the scenes and the few dialogs are very poor. Can any viewer explain the senseless conclusion? My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "A Princesa de Nebraska" ("The Princess of Nebraska")

This is a story about lost generations on both sides of the Pacific. Some of the lost on the American side are older, because we got here first. Some of the lost more recently immigrated because as we all know, their star is rising as ours is falling.

I didn't hate this movie. I felt for the lead character, who comes across as a spoiled brat in the total absence of any real support system visible to the film audience. Her alienation & loneliness is a metaphor for the age in which we live, where we may have more friends on social media than we have in real life.

That she at least felt for the life inhabiting her body, when most of her cohort were completely indifferent, made me sympathize with her.

The individual scenes of the movie were pretty well done, I thought, but when strung together did not make for a great movie.