1 Girl Infinite

Standing in the doorway, Yin Jia watches Tong Tong sleeping. By swinging the mirrored wardrobe door on its hinges, she can move light across the orange-haired girl’s face, creating the impression of animation, of interest. At a metaphorical level, she’s always projecting things onto her roommate and petty theft partner in crime – but then, Tong Tong is always feigning disinterest. It’s a complicated relationship. Little clues to the truth come in the form of the paper butterflies on the wall, the casual way their bodies slump together when no-one else is around, and the way Tong Tong throws up her arms and squeals with delight as they speed away from the beauty parlour which has just fired her, and from which she has vengefully stolen a bag. Neither of them speaks about what this is, but neither has needed to – and they both seem to feel it.

To the cool girls in the park, who have stolen booze, Tong Tong laments that she can’t get rid of that annoying girl who just follows her everywhere. Jia gets jealous sometimes, but for the most part she takes it in her stride. After all, at night, in the quiet of their room, Tong Tong is absolutely hers. But when Tong Tong takes up with a group of guys who are involved in more serious criminal endeavours, and starts getting close to a drug dealer who likes to touch her up in public, things turn sour. Jia develops the obsessive, brooding character of someone who believes that she’s at risk of losing everything. Frantic, she clings to Tong Tong ever more tightly, which threatens to squeeze that life out of what they still have.

A beautifully played, character-driven story, screening as part of Queer East 2025, 1 Girl Infinite explores feelings that have grown up in the absence of analysis, without any social framework through which to make sense of them. Jia knows what she desires but needs the more practical Tong Tong to figure out the details. There is sometimes a sense that Tong Tong is exploiting her, but a deep vein of emotion runs just beneath the surface. By contrast, Tong Tong’s relationship with the dealer, Chen Wen, is more transactional in nature, but even that is ambiguous. Is he getting her wasted so that he can take sexual advantage or is she, knowing that sex will be part of the deal, allowing herself to get into a state where she won’t care as much? Is the jealousy she expresses over him romantically inspired, or is it about fear of the loss of the small amount of power she has?

Though the story is slight, we get small insights into other factors that have shaped the girls’ lives. Jia is an orphan, alone in the world. As such she needs to be tough, to know how to survive on her own, and she can talk the talk, but when she watches the workers in the fish market, the brutality there is too much for her (it may be too much for some viewers too). She’s afraid that she doesn’t have what it takes. Tong Tong, meanwhile, loves feminine trappings and frivolity but seems to move easily through the world, resistant to damage. She dreams of going to America, “where everyone lives in big houses and they make lots of money.” One fears for her should this come to pass, but in Changsha, she at least knows how to pretend to be alright, and to shelter her erstwhile protector.

With both its heroines in their late teens, this could be viewed as a coming of age film. There are a number of firsts for both of them, and the weight of potentially life-changing decisions sits alongside scenes in which they run through the streets laughing and squealing and throwing rotten fruit at parked cars. A darker surrounding narrative threatens to turn it into something else, but hope springs up in the strangest of places. in the end, for all its scenes of riotous play and dramatically expressed grievance, what matters is its intense intimacy and the sense that these characters are clumsy enough to be real.

1 Girl Infinite screens at Queer East on 3 May. Read more here.

Reviewed on: 23 Apr 2025