
Call me
(Hu wo)
Screening on Film
With Li Mengnan, Ji Bo, Yan Danchen.
China, 2000, 35mm, color, 87 min.
Mandarin with English subtitles.
An intricate tapestry of parallel narratives that unfolds over the course of seven days, Call Me, as the title suggests, concerns the quest for human contact in the city. Newly uprooted from the provinces, the two main characters struggle to get by in the teeming Chinese capital by delivering flowers and selling blood. Their lives soon intersect with others who seek emotional intimacy. The flower vendor tries in vain to deliver a bouquet to a young woman on behalf of a client, while the guileless migrant laborer, reduced to selling blood, contracts AIDS and desperately tries to locate those who have received his blood. Their repeated pleas for response, relayed through a messaging center, give the film its title and become a metaphor for the characters’ inability to achieve direct connection.