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‘Guo Ran’ Review: An Exquisite Chinese Close-Up of a Woman Increasingly Alone in Her Pregnancy

A young couple are expecting a baby in Li Dongmei's delicate, acutely observed chamber piece 'Guo Ran,' but only one of them sees herself as a parent.

An expectant mother finds her relationship almost imperceptibly coming apart — right at the moment she most needs some care and kinship — in “ Guo Ran,” a silently wrenching second feature from Chinese writer-director Li Dongmei that deftly identifies generational malaise in individual crisis. Yet as her bearing and behavior change, her partner grows only more remote and recessive, wholly consumed with the screen-based demands of work — answering curtly when she raises decisions they should be making together, and barely tearing himself from his desk when, after going to the bathroom one evening, she announces alarming bloody discharge. Li and gifted French DP Matthias Delvaux (“Snow Leopard”) counterintuitively paint Yu’s anguish in tones of stark, sun-saturated white, whether on the tellingly under-decorated walls of her apartment or the neutral comfort of starched hospital sheets — presenting the world around her as a blank slate, empty but still open to reinvention.

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