‘Girls on Wire’ Review: Two Cousins Reunited on a Chinese Film Set Are Trapped in a Melodrama of Their Own Making

Peter Debruge

17 February 2025 at 8:00 pm·5-min read

Flying high in one of the world’s most male-dominated film industries, Chinese writer-director Vivian Qu follows up her acclaimed 2017 drama “Angels Wear White” with the almost-good “Girls on Wires.” Focused on the uneasy reunion between two estranged cousins who team up to beat the cycle of drug abuse and debt that’s been dragging their family down for decades, this is ambitious, moral-minded cinema for a mainstream Chinese audience, and as such, it seems only fair to forgive the kind of hammy acting and manipulative melodrama Americans accept from Clint Eastwood and Tyler Perry movies.

There’s something charmingly old-fashioned in the way Qu tries to move viewers, using flashbacks to memories between cutie-pie kiddos Fang Di and Tian Tian — who were raised almost like sisters in Chongqing — to ensure the adversity they face as adults produces the expected quantity of tears. At the same time, the novelty comes in setting the present-day portion in Xiangshan Film City, a vast production facility where Fang Di (Wen Qi) works as a stuntwoman. Doing so not only brings audiences into the filmmaking process, but gives the story a clever behind-the-scenes feel, à la “Day for Night,” as Fang Di’s action-movie training prepares her to “star” in a real-life thriller.

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The movie actually opens on Tian Tian (Liu Haocun), who’s been held in captivity, beaten and injected with heroin for reasons that won’t be revealed until much later in the film. The unfortunate wretch makes an exciting escape, killing her captor in the process. (If this is how Tian Tian was treated for her past “transgressions,” then we don’t want to see what the gangsters will do to her if they catch her again.) Though she hasn’t seen her cousin in nearly five years, Tian Tian turns to her now, hoping that Fang Di can help sort out her problems — without realizing that she’s exposing her surrogate sis to considerable risk in the process.

Fang Di has spent her entire professional career repaying family debts, those incurred by both her factory-operating mom (Peng Jing) and Tian Tian’s drug-addict dad (Zhou You) back in Chongqing, city of copycat fashion and first-class hotpot. What any viewer wants for these young women is to see them liberated from the financial burdens of their parents, but the cousins are cursed with cleaning up the previous generation’s messes. Only then can they tend to their own.

Tian Tian’s troubles first blur with dream-factory artifice when she arrives at the outskirts of Film City covered in her own blood, and a wuxia movie extra asks, “Did you do your own makeup?” Through a smart twist no male screenwriter would imagine, Tian Tian locates her cousin (who orders a box of tampons delivered to set) and watches as Fang Di steps in to do a martial arts stunt the undependable male double couldn’t: In take after take, she’s plunged into ice-cold water and then whisked through the air on wires.

Fang Di is badly bruised in her work, but hides her injuries lest she be dismissed or deemed “difficult” — the kind of detail that acknowledges just how dangerous her work really is (but makes Qu’s decision to shoot the climactic scene on a freezing beach seem rather perverse). When Tian Tian steps forward, Fang Di seems understandably wary to see her, withdrawing cash from an ATM that’s promptly snatched away by debt collectors. Money is a constant source of stress in the film — a prop to be tossed in the face of a leech like Tian Tian’s dad, while shouting things like, “Take what you love!”

The strange thing about Qu’s script is that her story is strong, anchored by two compelling characters and set in evocative locations, but most of the scenes are bluntly written. Her dialogue is so heavy-handed, it’s a wonder the actors can get through it. “My dad is trash. So am I,” Tian Tian tells her cousin in a line meant to engender sympathy, though eye-rolls seem more likely.

In another scene, Tian Tian hovers outside a film set while Fang Di gives a dramatic audition for a corny TV role, screaming clichés about how she donated her own bone marrow to save her family. When a colleague tells her the performance was almost “too good,” he’s underlining that the scene obviously tapped into something personal from her past. Don’t be fooled. None of the acting in “Girls on Wire” is too good (and in one very funny sequence, when three gangsters roaming Film City get drafted as extras, bad acting gets a big laugh). Still, it does the job, driving the melodrama forward.

When Qu really wants to tug our emotions, she flashes back to the cousins as little girls. After all, who can resist the tragedy of a child forced to endure what young Tian Tian did? Her life was ruined before she ever had a chance by her father’s addiction and schemes. Those are the figurative wires that hold her down, while invisible cables lift her cousin two decades later. In Chinese, the film’s title means “Girls Who Want to Fly.” Their lives are heavy, but just maybe, Qu can free them via movie magic.

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