Ju wai ren

Yan Zhengfan's "Stranger" is an excellent piece of filmmaking. Catch it at a local festival if you can. It's a meditation on belonging and, especially, non-belonging (which, I guess, is partly what appealed so much to me). If you are fascinated by the strangeness of in-between places (the limbo of hotel rooms), if you like staring into someone else's windows where lives unfold and squeeze back shut, you will enjoy Yan Zhengfan's work just like I did. As one of the characters puts it: "The new place never becomes familiar, while the old place continues to grow stranger." I caught some echoes of other excellent contemporary Chinese auteurs in the director's style: Jia Zhangke's unhurried pacing, Diao Yi'nan's moodiness (and yes, the fondness for shabby hotel rooms), Bi Gan's dream-like exploration of the background settings almost as vivid as characters themselves. Yet I felt that the film held its own very well. Highly recommended.