Crowning Chloé Zhao
LAUREN DEVINE wonders whether we can take the Nomadland director’s awards season success as a harbinger for the diversification of the film industry we’ve been waiting for.
Chloé Zhao is a woman of firsts. The first Asian woman nominated for best director at the Golden Globes; the first woman of colour to win the Academy award for Best Director (the second woman in 93 years of the Oscars, following Katheryn Bigelow for 2010’s The Hurt Locker); and the first woman to be nominated for four Oscars in a single year - for Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing.
In her acceptance speech on Sunday—onstage at the Academy’s covid-adapted venue of Union Station in downtown LA where attendees were rigorously tested, scheduled and socially distanced—Zhao thanked the van-dwelling community that inspired the film, for “teaching us the power of resilience and hope, and reminding us what true kindness looks like.”
These intimations, of resilience, hope, and the humbling power of human kindness, anchor Zhao’s filmmaking and characterise the stories she tells so compellingly. Her work to date runs an eclectic gamut of human experiences, with her distinctive docu-poetic aesthetic heavily informed by her own feelings of being constantly in flux and on the move.
Born Zhao Ting in Beijing, 1982, Zhao did a stint as a teenager at the picturesque Brighton College boarding school before finishing her high school education in Los Angeles - according to her, frequently zoning out, drawing manga and hiding comics in her textbook sleeves (a high school boredom-defeating trick I recognise only too well). After studying politics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and finally moving to New York, meandering from real estate to party promoting and bartending, Zhao was 28 when she enrolled to study film production in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate program. With Spike Lee among her teachers, it was at NYU that Zhao began to explore what would become her signature cinematic weaving of fiction and reality.
Her striking debut feature Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015), developed in workshops at the Sundance Institute, tells the tale of a disaffected Lakota teen torn between his South Dakota reservation and the lights of Los Angeles. A series of funding fall-throughs led to Zhao abandoning her initial plan to use actors, turning instead to a cast of non-actors with whom she cultivated close relationships during filming on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Zhao found the lead for her next film within the same community. The Rider (2017) breaks from the archetypal Western tradition with an understated lead performance from real-life cowboy Brady Jandreau, spotlighting the non-fictional struggle of this Lakota Sioux cowboy after a severe brain trauma threatens his return to the saddle. Drawing inspiration from those whose lives provide the essence of her films, with Zhao’s sophomore film earning coveted accolades at both Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival, these initial cinematic offerings demonstrated Zhao’s talent for crafting illuminating, semi-biographical stories set against awe-inspiring landscapes that take on a presence all their own in her films.
And now, one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, set under the star-strewn skies of the American West. Nomadland is a thinly fictionalized ode to life on America’s roads, helmed by a searing lead performance from Frances McDormand and based on the lives of an ensemble cast of nomads who play characters based on themselves. The elegiac emotional palette of Nomadland resists portraying a story without hope. Instead, honing in on an abandoned sect of American society with a stylistic grace devoid of condescension, Zhao’s understated lens lends an intimate dimension to the resilience of a generation who lost everything in the Great Recession. A deft counter to the myth of the American Dream, Nomadland mediates the reality of those for whom this supposedly universal ideal no longer applies.
Nomadland is case in point for Zhao’s organic approach. The director, lead McDormand and much of the crew removed themselves from the usual trappings of a film shoot to emulate the transient lifestyles of their van-dwelling subject-actors, immersing themselves in their ensemble cast’s on-the-road reality for months of filming - a fact that belies Nomadland’s $5 million-dollar budget. The resulting blurring of the distinctions between drama and documentary walks an imperceptible tightrope between the mystic and the palpably real, striking a chord with audiences that is still reverberating the world over.
From under-the-radar beginnings cutting her teeth on independent productions, Zhao has emerged a uniquely powerful storyteller set to make her mark in Hollywood. Her latest project, directing Marvel’s hotly anticipated Eternals, debuts the superhero agglomerate’s first (and long-awaited, thanks to covid-induced release delays) LGBTQ+-focused storyline. Eternals too comprises a markedly more diverse and representative cast than the superhero movie-sphere has hitherto given us, including deaf actor Lauren Ridloff as Marvel’s first deaf superhero. Zhao seems a fitting candidate with whom to entrust this potentially franchise-defining leap in Marvel’s cinematic development.
Combine the quest for authenticity consuming our current cultural moment with a new generation—film lovers of the now, tastemakers of the future—inspired by and drawn to evermore intuitive modes of storytelling, and the future for progressive filmmakers like Zhao looks bright. Her sinuous journey and genre-bending aesthetic are far removed from what we’ve come to recognise as the established trajectory for Hollywood success, and I wonder if we can look forward to Zhao’s work inspiring more filmmakers to forge their own paths and go on to achieve more firsts, until recognition of the marginalised and underrepresented with prestigious industry accolades—already long overdue—is no longer a revelation, but the norm.
Nomadland will premiere on Disney+ on April 30, with cinematic releases worldwide in May.
Cover Photo: GETTY IMAGES
