"Stonewalling" begins with a celebration, an idyllic outdoor gathering of young Chinese men and women who've been taking English classes in preparation for exciting travels and new opportunities abroad. The year is 2019, and the mood is optimistic, the food and wine abundant. Their teacher stands and, in fluent if slightly faltering English, offers them some airy words of encouragement: "Don't over-engineer your life. … Sometimes life's about 'go with the flow.' Don't overthink it. Live at the moment."
By the end of this toughly observed, brutally honest movie, that speech — and this entire dumb evening, with its patio string lights, matcha cakes and banal chitchat — will seem like purest fantasy.
Seated at the table, and so quiet and unobtrusive that it takes a moment to register her as the movie's principal character, is a pretty 20-year-old college student named Lynn (Yao Honggui). She's there with her boyfriend, Zhang (Liu Long), a polished go-getter with big dreams: They'll learn English, and Lynn will work as a flight attendant until they've saved enough to move to the U.K. In the meantime, they're living at a hotel in the city of Changsha and getting by through odd modeling gigs. Yet as her boyfriend condescendingly natters on and on and posts his pics on TikTok, Lynn looks vaguely ill at ease, not entirely with the program, and not just because of the persistent pain in her breast.
