The girls from the massage center

In Chinese-American filmmaker Constance Tsang's surprising debut, spaces serve to portray the oppressive lives of her subjects, but also to encapsulate their fleeting moments of happiness. Didi and Amy are two Chinese friends who work and live in a massage parlor in a New York City neighborhood under conditions of labor and sexual exploitation. Their lives intersect with that of Cheung, a lonely, older Taiwanese immigrant who works for a construction company. To tell this story of diaspora, grief, and second chances, Tsang moves away from the aesthetics of cinema. indie American to construct a radically personal film that is closer to the formal rigor of Chantal Akerman than to the tragicomic empathy of Sean Baker's cinema.

The filmmaker confines her characters in narrow spaces and films them in slow sequence shots that reveal the complexity of the migrant experience. Existences marked by material precariousness and a suffocating (legal, economic) structure of control, however, also by the emergence of unexpected affections, such as the one that manifests between Didi and Cheung in the tender and beautiful opening scene in the restaurant. The presence of an icon of contemporary cinema and regular collaborator of Tsai Ming-liang how Lee Kang-sheng (excellent in the role of Cheung) certifies Tsang's willingness to experiment, who closes his film with a prolonged close-up of the actor's face that seems an explicit homage to the director of Pstreet mistakes.

[See the screenings in the original version with Catalan subtitles] in this link]