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Fleeing from her village, she becomes an unlikely picaresque heroine, living by her wits while resisting a seemingly inevitable descent into prostitution. Eventually she winds up in Britain, where she finds a job in a massage parlour and enters into a marriage of convenience with an obliging elderly customer (Geoffrey Hutchings) – but her adventures don’t end there. The writer-director Guo Xiaolu films this chronicle in an unadorned style, as if she and her crew were simply tagging along for the ride; the film flirts with cliche in evoking a familiar modern sensation of drift (an emblematic image: Mei slumped with her backpack by the side of an overpass, watching the cars go by). But Guo’s intelligence is evident in her refusal to portray Mei as either heroic or hateful – and in her division of the story into wryly titled chapters, perhaps a nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962).