Tina Kakadelis
The COVID-19 pandemic feels like it was a million years ago and yesterday. The isolation, fear, and separation were such a bizarre experience. Humans are meant to be surrounded by others. We’re a social species. Some of us have different social quotas, but everyone stumbled a little during the quarantine times of Covid. Writer-director Shan Jiang’s Ephemera takes place sometime in the after. Around the bend of history. No one wears masks, but the lingo and phrases that were part of our daily vernacular are not yet semi-foreign on the tongue. It’s in this eerie, hesitant time of reconnection that Jiang builds her world.
Shanghai is sweltering and it’s becoming too much for Asher (Yvonne Shuyu Zhang) to bear. Born in Shanghai, Asher lived there for ten years before moving to Los Angeles. Now in her early twenties, she has briefly moved back, but her time in Shanghai is coming to an end. This conclusion gives her the confidence to finally ask her hip-hop teacher, Tori (Shu-Yi), out for coffee. The coffee meet-up begins casually, two people getting to know one another, before time begins to stretch. Tori and Asher find themselves suggesting another outing, another place to visit to elongate this night.
Ephemera opens in a frantic, social media style. Asher has dreams of becoming an actor and, by association, a bit of an influencer. This fast-paced opening creates a contrast to the rest of the film. Just because things slow down as the movie unfolds, though, doesn’t mean that Jiang is done playing with the medium. Around the middle of the film, Asher and Tori talk about some of the remnants of Covid. Tori brings up the “spatiotemporal cube,” the way some governments tracked the passage of the virus. When she explains the concept, the aspect ratio of the film shrinks down. Each Asher and Tori now have their own little frame. These frames wobble and shake as they move toward each other, a beautiful visualization of the magnetism that is building between them.
Comparisons between Ephemera and the Before Trilogy are unavoidable, and Jiang isn’t running from them. She has a great joke in her script about this connection, but the comparisons begin and end with the loose concept. It’s an easy way to explain the film: a queer, Shanghainese version of Before Sunrise, but that comparison only works in the simplest of explanations. Tori and Asher are not total strangers. They’ve had months of being in each other’s proximity and exchanged some words as well. They’re also not strangers in the world they walk around in. They know these streets, have favorite noodle shops, and have called this place home. These roots add a significantly different flavor to the connection between Tori and Asher. They give weight to the setting. In Before Sunrise, Vienna is a blank canvas. In Ephemera, Shanghai represents a place of freedom for Tori and a place of contradictions for Asher. She explains to Tori that she feels like she’s split in two. What the person who grew up in Shanghai and the person who grew up in Los Angeles have in common is that they inhabit the same body. Otherwise, they feel foreign to each other.
In Shanghainese, the film’s title translates to “floating and wandering.” That combination is a perfect description of how it must feel to be in the shoes of Asher and Tori. The giddy weightlessness of being drawn to someone and the ambling nature of their walk around the city. Interestingly, the film’s English title has a slightly different meaning. “Ephemera” refers to an item that is not supposed to have meaning, but that has become preserved by someone. The two women discuss memories and whose job it is to shepherd these recollections as the moment ends. What do we gain from remembering? What do we lose? Ephemera is one evening in a lifetime of thousands. It was not conceived to be of great importance. Not one of those nights with months of build-up, but one that comes about because a butterfly flapped its wings just so. Ephemera captures the world around us in its everyday magic.
