Katarina Zhu’s first feature is gentle, closely observed and well acted, particularly by Zhu herself and Perry Yung as her father. It is also a film about a woman who cannot decide what she wants, and for long stretches it cannot decide either.
Katarina Zhu writes, directs, produces and plays the lead in her first feature, and Bunnylovr has the virtues and the faults of a film made by one person about one person. Rebecca performs for strangers on a webcam from her New York flat, takes their money and their compliments, and has stopped being able to tell the two apart. Zhu has an eye for what loneliness looks like in a lit room, and a good deal of patience. She has less of a story, and at 86 minutes the film still finds room to drift. It is a promising debut we cannot quite recommend.
What works is the acting, starting with Zhu’s own. She plays Rebecca with a face that gives the camera almost nothing, on purpose, and lets us watch the small effort it costs her to smile for a paying audience and then let the smile go when the laptop shuts. Perry Yung is better still as William, the father who left. He plays him as a man who has practised his apology for years and cannot get it out, and the scenes between them, mostly small talk in kitchens and waiting rooms, are the only ones in which Rebecca plainly wants something. We did not expect to be moved by two people failing to have a conversation, and we were; a moment where he asks about her work and she answers with the truth, and he nods and changes the subject, caught in the throat.
Daisy Zhou shoots close and soft and often lets the laptop do the lighting, so that Rebecca’s face is lit from below by the people watching her. It is a simple idea and it holds. Carol Kim dresses the flat with a ring light, an unmade bed and not much else, and Holly McClintock puts Rebecca in performance underwear for the camera and the same grey hoodie for everything else, so we always know which version of her we are getting. Eli Keszler’s score is brushed drums and small clicks that sound like a clock rather than a mood, and it is the one part of the film that seems aware time is passing.
The trouble is the people who are not her father. John (Austin Amelio) is a regular who wants a relationship with a woman he pays to look at him, and the film wants him to be both a threat and a comfort and never settles on either, so he ends up as neither. Carter (Jack Kilmer) wanders in and out as an ex without leaving a mark. Rachel Sennott, who also produces, plays the friend Bella at a pitch the rest of the film does not share; every time she arrives it turns into a louder, broader picture for two minutes and then turns back. And the rabbit, a creature that must be fed by a woman who cannot feed herself, is a metaphor we understood on delivery. The film keeps unwrapping it.
Stephania Dulowski cuts most scenes a beat before they resolve, which is a choice, and it works the first two or three times. After that it becomes the film’s only rhythm, and the effect is of watching someone leave a series of rooms. Around the hour mark we found ourselves checking how much was left. There were twenty-six minutes, and for a film this short that is not a good sign.
Most critics are split down the middle on this one, and so, in a sense, are we. It is better than most first features at faces and rooms and the specific way a young woman can be surrounded by attention and starved of it. It is worse than most at shape. Zhu clearly knows this woman; she has not yet worked out what happens to her, and the film ends roughly where a second draft might have started.
Watch it at home, on a quiet evening, where its long silences will not have to compete with anything and Yung’s few scenes can land as they deserve. If Zhu makes a second film we will be there early. This one is for people who like their dramas small and their endings withheld, and who do not mind being handed a rabbit and asked to work out what it means.
