Notes of a Crocodile

News of a half-constructed building full of crocodiles brings a Chinese woman to Phnom Penh. She walks along the Mekong River in search of a lost friend.

A woman arrives in Phnom Penh. The image is wobbly, recorded on a phone, coarse. She crosses the city, passes some builders hard at work, walks by gutted façades. A restaurant, a snippet of conversation. It’s about a friend – she is looking for a Chinese woman about whom we know precious little. The film mingles her wanderings with a broader reflection on modernity, accumulation and erasure. A first-person voice-over weaves fragments of memory and desire. Formerly swampland, the city is growing on moving foundations, swallows up what remains of the past. The river, the roads, the buildings under construction, everything seems suspended, drowned in the constant humming of engines. Fleeting visions surge up: the unmoving eye of a crocodile, a child dancing, the body of a creature sliding under water. 
Borrowing its title from the cult queer novel by Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin, Daphne Xu’s film prolongs the spirit of the book.  With an impressive mise en scène, it oscillates between raw reality and mirage, blurring the frontier between observation and dream. Its exploded form espouses the instability of a mutating territory, as if memory itself were imposing the rhythm of the film. A murky and elusive figure, the echo of a sunken world, the crocodile prowls among the images.

Nepheli Gambade