Spider Lilies

Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies is a film that is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.

The film has two main characters. The first is Jade, a cam girl. The second is Takeko, a tattoo artist. Takeko lives with her brother who has amnesia after an earthquake that killed their father. The only thing he can remember is his father’s spider lily tattoo. Takeko has the same tattoo which she got in an effort to jog his memory. Jade decides she wants a tattoo which brings her to Takeko’s shop. Lo and behold, Jade and Takeko knew each other as children. Takeko was Jade’s first crush. Meanwhile, a police officer is working to take down cam girls. This leads him to Jade. But Jade tells him stories and displays vulnerability so the police officer falls for her and begins visiting regularly. However, Jade believes her anonymous online admirer is Takeko which leads to misunderstandings.

I want to applaud Spider Lilies‘ depicted of someone working as a cam girl. A lot of depictions of this job involve needless scenes of titillation. Teenage Cocktail for example had long montages of young girls acting sexy in their underwear which added nothing to the plot. Spider Lilies avoids this. While Jade’s job is inherently sexual, the movie largely does not sexualize these scenes. There’s no needless, proactive scenes of her stripping or being seductive for uninterrupted periods of time. The only scene featuring Jade in the nude isn’t sexual. It’s meant to show her as vulnerable and almost innocent. In short, these scenes don’t feel exploitative. It doesn’t feel like the decision was made for her to engage in this profession because the writer/director was horny. Instead, it’s actually relevant to the plot and the scenes involving Jade camming actually advance the plot.

Throughout the movie, we see flashbacks of Jade and Takeko as children. These scenes are adorable. They’re so sweet and innocent. This innocence follows through to the present. There’s such sweetness and innocence to a lot of Jade and Takeko’s scenes. While Jade could be very jaded by her work as a cam girl, this all disappears around Takeko. She becomes a little girl with a crush again. It’s incredibly cute. When there are romantic scenes between Jade and Takeko, they’re incredibly tender and romantic even if they are no longer innocent. Nobody can do yearning like the gays. Even as the fictional characters achieve romance and human connection onscreen, director Zero Chou’s own yearning shines through and makes these scenes feel poignant and full of desire.

There’s an overall somewhat tragic sense of hope to Spider Lilies. It doesn’t come from the characters but from the film itself. This is a fairly dark story. Spider Lilies is about a sex worker who lives in a country where her work is illegal and her sexuality not openly tolerated. However, the movie is so hopeful because it’s a love story. There’s this feeling like every bad thing in these women’s lives wouldn’t matter if they loved each other. That level of hope almost hurts because it is likely naive. But it does make me root for these characters all the more.

The other subplots in the film are not as good as the romance. The scenes featuring the police sting on the cam website are almost funny because the male characters are so flat and bland. It genuinely seems like Zero Chu doesn’t understand or know how to write male characters. This is objectively bad but does make me laugh because it’s such a switch from the norm of male directors not understanding how women work.

The other subplot is about Takeko’s brother with amnesia. It’s also not great. There’s not much medical accuracy to be found and feels too much like melodrama. This subplot also features two scenes of people losing arms. They definitely used the same severed arm prop for both scenes and it was a bad prop both times.

My final negative is the sound. Admittedly, maybe this was due to the online copy I was watching. But at least in my version, it was clear that the audio was recorded separately from the video and they didn’t quite sync up. It sounds so much like all of the audio was added in post and that is somewhat distracting.

These negatives don’t change the fact that Spider Lilies is a film with earnest passion. Zero Chou shows such potential as a director because of how much she clearly cares about being able to tell this story. Spider Lilies’ core romance is very sweet and romantic. Maybe the stuff around it isn’t as good but that’s not the focus anyway.

Overall rating: 7.6/10

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