There is an old cliché that makes us hope, perhaps wish, that a film from Asian lands, particularly China, presents us with characters fighting with swords, displaying vigorous flying movements to defy the law of gravity… And we remember examples like The Tiger and the Dragon (2000), by Ang Lee, or The Secret of the Flying Daggers (2004), by Zhang Yimou. In a suggestive way, although certainly somewhat debatable, perhaps we can say that Girls on Wireby the Chinese Vivian Qu, appears as an heir to that tradition, albeit in a frankly ambiguous way, if only because of the realistic drive of its proposals.
The heritage is in the title itself. Girls on Wire (literally: Girls on the wire) is an expression that arises, precisely, from the activity of young Fang Di (Wen Qi): She works as a duo in the film industry, specializing in starring in spectacular adventures, sometimes very risky, in which her body is literally trapped by wires. In fact, his dedication to such arduous work results from the need to pay family debts arising from an inheritance that is not strange to some connections with mafia entities.
All of this ends up being relaunched in an even more dramatic way when his cousin Tian Tian (Liu Haocun) appears, whom he hasn’t seen in five years. Considering their family background, Fang Di devalues the warm childhood memories they both share, even trying to repel Tian Tian. What is certain is that the past is far from being disposable (we get to know its tribulations through flashbacks inserted with remarkable subtlety), in such a way that the two cousins will live an odyssey of rescuing their own identities which, at certain moments, intersects with the behind-the-scenes artifices in which many scenes take place.
Wen Qi and Liu Haocun are brilliant, composing their characters as figures haunted by the legacy of their elders, without this translating into any symbolic scheme about the dialogue (or ruptures) between generations. As in the riskier sequences that Fang Di stars in as a duo — one of them, around filming in water, on a very cold night, stands out for its surprising physical vibrancy —, the two heroines are, after all, survivors of a universe (familiar, first and foremost) in which the mythification of youth exists as a cruel illusion. Hence Girls on Wire it has the nostalgic energy of a Series B film, whilst underlining the very current dimension of its dramatic upheavals — in short, a discreet marvel.
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