Director Deep Dive: The “Feminine Gaze” of Zeng Qingjie (A Familiar Stranger, Butterflied Lover)
What does it mean to film something through a “feminine gaze”?
Unsurprisingly, this is a tough question to answer. In filmmaking, the feminine gaze is usually offered as an alternative to the “male gaze” or the ways movies and tv depict women as passive sex objects. Although filmmakers and scholars disagree over the definition and even value of the term, I like to think that, in its most basic form, the feminine gaze is visual storytelling that subverts or redefines how gender looks on screen.
I think one director whose visual storytelling often taps into that feminine gaze is Zeng Qingjie so I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the stylistic choices that make his work unique.
I first came across Zeng’s work via the short dramas A Familiar Stranger and Butterflied Lover.
What struck me about these two fantasy romances is how different they feel despite having relatively standard plots for their genre. Both dramas are dreamy and refreshingly sensual and intimate. They touch on taboo topics like menstruation, abortion, and the dangers of pregnancy while also quietly challenging traditional gender roles. But most interesting to me is how they center their women protagonists not just in the plot but in the way the camera captures their image. These are women stories and it's evident down to the cinematography.
Style Element: Subjectivity
For instance, Zeng's visual storytelling often uses subjectivity.
Subjective cinematography is when we the viewers see what a character sees or feel what a character feels because of the camera’s position, movement, lenses, etc. It’s considered a critical feature of the feminine gaze because it forces us to recognize the thoughts and feelings of women characters who are often overlooked in traditional media.
Zeng adopts several cinematography techniques to put the audience in the mind of his women protagonists, and together these techniques encourage us to empathize with them, especially in their darkest moments.
One of my favorite examples of this is an early scene of Butterflied Lover.
In the drama, Tang Qianyue, the FL, has been infected by a poison that turns people into monsters known as "butterfly slaves". Qianyue knows she has been infected but to appear normal in front of her loved ones secretly suppresses her monster form. One day, however, she begins turning into a butterfly slave against her will.
As seen above, the scene of her transformation consists of many long shots that showcase the full horror of her monster form.
But the scene ends with a close-up of her face, the camera lingering on the anguish she feels at her body betraying her. Look at how the camera keeps her face in focus but her claws blur with the background, her blood-red eyes hidden in shadow. Zeng wants us to understand how she feels in this moment, not what danger she presents. She might be a monster but we feel pity for her rather than hate or disgust because of the humanizing subjectivity of the camera language.
(Side Note: I don't think it's an accident that most of the infected people shown in their butterfly slave form are women given that monsters in media often symbolize the unknown or uncontrollable elements of the feminine experience. It makes me wonder about the role of female monsters in Chinese myth and whether there are parallels to their patriarchal meaning in Ancient Greek mythology.)
I think another good example of this humanizing camera language is in the sexual assault scene of A Familiar Stranger.
Unlike many shows that depict sexual assault in an erotic way (i.e., filmed to make us sexually excited about a woman’s powerlessness and nakedness), Zeng uses a combination of close-ups, shallow depth of field, and canted angles to make us feel the violation. With the intimate but disorienting effect of these camera techniques, we feel Shi Qi's duress but also clearly see her attacker's abuse of power. We feel what she feels and therefore have a better understanding of what it's like being a woman trying to navigate the world. It’s an awful moment but one that doesn't objectify or visually disempower her as a character.
Style Element: Sexuality and Feminine Desire
(Side Note: Woot woot pregnancy sex)
Zeng also challenges the ways women's bodies are typically objectified on screen by how he portrays his characters' sexuality. In his dramas, women aren't passive sex objects but instead subjects who experience sexual desire and express it.
I love the intro of A Familiar Stranger for this very reason.
The show opens with the camera languidly panning across a line of bare legs and scantily clad bodies, their owners posed seductively. It’s a stereotypical example of the male gaze reducing women to their bodies.
But then Zeng's subverts this male gaze when he has one of the women look right into the camera in a subtle fourth wall break.
According to filmmaker-critic Joey Soloway, such moments are an example of "returning the gaze" and are a way for women characters to articulate how they feel about being seen as objects:
"When a female character breaks the fourth wall, they acknowledge the reality that they are being watched and are refusing to remain passive in that. Instead of being gazed upon, they remind us of their agency by directly addressing us and giving us insight into what they’re thinking and what emotions their actions are being motivated by." (Mariel Cipriaso)
Through this technique, we learn that the seductive performance is not for the benefit of some man on screen (or in the audience) but instead themselves. These women, who also happen to be sex workers, are posing for a portrait as a cheeky way to celebrate their own beauty and sensuality divorced from the services they provide male clients (with some sapphic undertones to boot!).
They are in control of the camera not the other way around.
Ultimately, these are stories where women find pleasure, and the intimacy scenes reflect that.
Everything is softly lit and impressionistically shot as if the characters are lost in the haze of their mutual desire. The use of close-up and extreme close-up shots further play with our senses, giving us the tactile feeling of skin on skin, breath against breath. Unlike stories filmed through the male gaze, Zeng’s camera doesn’t reduce his women characters to body parts and mere receptacles of male desire—they’re active participants who desire and enjoy their partners just as much.
And what I find particularly interesting is that the scenes don’t just “center” these women’s POV but instead show how sex (and touch more broadly) is a vehicle for emotional intimacy and the impact of that intimacy on their male partners. (That hand flex below is giving Mr. Darcy.) Sex and physical intimacy between men and women is transformative not exploitative.
In these two dramas, women aren't objects of desire that men use for their own pleasure but instead subjects who are seen as such by the other characters* and, most importantly, Zeng Qingjie's camera.
(*Side Note: See @well-dressedwords' excellent analysis about the ML in A Familiar Stranger. His intuitive trust towards the FL is an example of seeing her as a subject. He doesn't recognize her for superficial reasons like beauty but her character, which he was able to glean when they first meet and she saves him--hence the title A Familiar Stranger.)
