Caught in the Web

Ye Lanqiu was told that morning that she has advanced cancer. She gets on a bus, hears nothing behind her sunglasses, and does not give up her seat to an elderly man. A reporter's assistant films it on a phone, the story runs, the video spreads, and within hours she is the sunglasses girl the whole country despises. Chen Kaige's film is about what China calls the human flesh search: a crowd tearing a stranger's entire life out of the internet and laying it in the open. The reporter's ambition, her editor's calculation, the audience's anger and a woman who tells nobody her diagnosis are all parts of the same machine. Gao Yuanyuan plays her, and the film was sent forward as China's Oscar submission.