The Wuhan-Set Movie That Donald ‘Chinese Virus’ Trump Needs to See

In the Chinese director Diao Yi’nan’s latest film, The Wild Goose Lake—streaming now on Apple TV+—details are located not in narrative but in atmosphere. The key for the restless viewer—perhaps still in lockdown in the midst of a global pandemic—is to not get lost in the story, but to be present in place. 

Zhou Zenong, a motorbike thief involved in an extensive crime syndicate, is on the run from the law, having mistakenly shot a police officer after being attacked himself by a fellow gang member. A young, still-faced sex worker—Liu Ai’ai—with a chic olive handbag and a red and white pack of cigarettes meets him at South train station, in Wuhan. They don’t know each other, but both operate in a fast-moving and often ruthless undercommons. This is the Wild Goose Lake district, which, a police chief points out, is still “uncontrolled,” elusive. And the stillness with which Diao imbues every frame demands that we look deeper into the soul of this world than the status quo would allow.

Wuhan, of course, is a place that Donald Trump has maligned with his xenophobic and racist dog whistles, claiming that the novel coronavirus was somehow concocted in the city where brave health-care workers and locals first encountered the outbreak of the virus in late 2019 and were able to beat it back earlier this year. (In the U.S., the woefully insufficient response to the virus has led to a new increase in cases in many reopened states, and Trump’s administration has just decided to withdraw the country from the only true authority on the matter, the World Health Organization.) Trump’s claims have led directly to hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans in the U.S. The Wild Goose Lake, expansive in its depiction of a relatively tiny corner of the huge Wuhan, offers a reminder of how small the imaginations of our leaders are. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.