Dragonfly Eyes is a 2017 Docu-Drama about a man’s obsession to find a woman he loves that went missing.
The premise of Dragonfly Eyes (Chinese: Qing ting zhi yan) is unique. Director Xu Bing took hours of surveillance footage and built a dramatic narrative around it, which is surely a daunting task, and while what he came up with initially holds a lot of promise, as it progresses, evolves into much more of a gimmick than an actual tool to tell a story.
When the movie opens we see a young girl walking along side of a riverbank like she is drunk. All of a sudden, she falls in, and it’s a shocking since we know this is all security cam footage and we may have actually just witnessed someone’s death. We then cut to this same young woman at temple of some sorts and she is going to become a nun, though I’m assuming that this is the same girl from before. Now we have a story on our plate. Who is this girl and what caused her to become like this? The movie then shows her working at a factory that milks cows, and it’s at this point I’m assuming we’ll learn why she became a nun, which in turn may lead to clues of what happened to her at the start. I’m still hooked.
Then we meet a young man who works at the same cow factory and we find out he’s in love with the girl, so much so that he tries to pick a fight with a woman who got the girl fired from a dry cleaning place (I really don’t remember why she got the job there). This causes him to be assaulted by the woman’s gangster boyfriend and a few of his thugs. It’s revealed that the girl likes the boy but wishes he would stop doing these things to help her out.
Perspectives continue to switch. The girl eventually decides to have surgery to alter the way she looks. Then the guy becomes obsessed with finding her, growing quite psychotic in his efforts. And here’s where things begin to change. I don’t mind when movies do this. I just wish they told a better story about him. If the movie is going to portray him as a dangerous psycho, then I’d could be down for this, but it tries to play him off as a nice guy who just misses this girl. It never once felt that way for me.
The footage that Xu Bing uses to tell his story is effective, however there were way too many scenes of random moments of violence for seemingly no reason, including a series of severe automobile accidents and sections of brutality. What frustrates me the most is that these moments come out of nowhere and added little to the plot. Worse, I still have no idea why the girl fell into the river.
The concept of using security cam footage to tell a story is a good one, yet I wish it incorporated more of it into the actual story line. Wouldn’t it be a lot more interesting if it was about this detective who is looking through this footage to find out why this girl threw herself in the water? This leaves Dragonfly Eyes with too many missed opportunities to recommend.
Dragonfly Eyes is one of many features playing at the 37th Minneapolis/ St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF). Learn more about the festival and the MSP Film Society here.