‘Characters Disappearing’ Review: Connor Sen Warnick’s Debut Presents a Timeless and Demure Vision of Revolutionary Chinatown in the 1970s

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Towards the end of Connor Sen Warnick’s debut “Characters Disappearing,” members of the I Wor Kuen, a radical Marxist Chinese-American group operating in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s, convene for a film screening. Mei (Yuka Murakami) is projecting a 16mm print of “The East is Red” (1965) on a bedsheet for her fellow radicals seated on fold-out chairs on an outdoor basketball court. Shot in 2022 but set in the 1970s, the warmth of Mei’s projector light contrasts with the white LED lights from passing cars, a temporally porous mise-en-scène that Warnick exploits throughout his film.

This is not the only present-tense intrusion into Warnick’s period piece, which follows twenty-something cousins Mei and Chris (played by Warnick) in 1970s Chinatown. The little-interrogated and yet underlying tension of every period film — the suspension of our temporal bearings — is essential to his project. Shot during the pandemic, modern cars, Patagonia jackets, and N95 masks dot Warnick’s midcentury tableau. If at first this may seem the result of budget limitations, these anachronisms become special effects in Warnick’s hands, as he depicts a past haunted by its future as well as a future not yet done with its past, particularly in light of the anti-Asian violence on the rise in Pandemic-era New York.

Though the film does feature the site-specific bogeymen associated with the radical politics of the era (organized crime, federal agents), it focuses more on the listless millings about of the two cousins in their artist-activist milieu. Mei searches for community and purpose with the I Wor Kuen while Chris withdraws from daily life into increasingly Spartan spiritual practices. She ponders a move to California and the gravity of her relationship with Leonard (Dylan Breaux), a Black man whose devotion (to the cause and to Mei) remains uncertain; he fasts in pursuit of longevity. If paranoia is on the breeze, so too is a sense of post-teenage stasis that seems to hang in the Chinatown air, caught between youth and adulthood, an immigrant past and a gentrified future.

Warnick wears his influences on his sleeve in “Characters Disappearing,” and he cribs less from Alan J. Pakula than from slow cinema and its antecedents: Tsai Ming-Liang, Edward Yang, Robert Bresson. Warnick’s characters, per Bresson, speak their lines mechanically. His camera rarely moves, favoring glacial pans when it does, and his editing metronome is molasses-slow, allowing the audience to live a while in the buzzing grain of his 16mm. It’s a style studied in its restraint, but well suited to the heady brew of resignation and urgency swirling around his characters, who keep one eye on the ominous men in black and another on the horizon line. “Maybe I’ll never leave New York,” Mei says to an art school friend at one point, her words landing as literal in this timeless world. Everything and nothing disappears, and Warnick’s narrative is pitched down the middle of these two extremes.

Though distinct from Mei in his disengagement from political struggle, Chris too grapples with these questions of forever and never. He tells a lover that he was born with extreme pigeon-toeing, with his feet twisted inward almost to the point of being upside-down and the implications for his subsequent struggles to gain a foothold in reality are almost too clear. His grandfather, Gong Gong, he learns, was the son of a powerful military general in China, who was friends with the real life Li Ching-Yuen, an herbalist who lived in the mountains and claimed to live to 250 years, dying only in 1993. Chris becomes engrossed with his grandfather’s book on the subject, “An Authentic and True Record of a 250-Year-Old Man,” and its teachings on the science of longevity. So begins his fasting, self-enforced isolation, and slow withdrawal from material life.

Warnick has pointed out in interviews that Li Ching-Yuen would likely still have been alive at the time his film is set, the inverse of the clean energy city buses rolling through his mid-70s Chinatown. In the director’s patient hands this mish-mashed sense of eternity feels not merely plausible but inevitable. Watching “Characters Disappearing,” one feels the absurdity of stopping traffic for a film shoot, of re-dressing a neighborhood in costume to keep the present out. History is something that is felt rather than told. One emerges from the film with little more knowledge about the I Wor Kuen than one entered with. Rather than a political program, we see faces that seem to age before our eyes, cramped apartments, doors, windows, and fish tanks forming frames within frames within frames, all the tiny wrinkles that imbricate spaces and times, reflecting a postmodern complexity that is rendered simple, tactile, and ageless.

A closing shot of fog rising off of a city park in the very early morning, the sun not yet having risen to the critical point when they turn the streetlights off, would have been a perfect place to end the film — a tidy and found summation of the cross-contamination of past and present. “Characters Disappearing” being a slightly academic exercise, the film does not end here, but rather with a direct citation of the final scene from Tsai Ming-Liang’s “What Time Is It There?” (2001). Still, we don’t suffer for a surplus of inheritors to Tsai’s nuanced approach to temporality in contemporary cinema, and the restraint demonstrated throughout “Characters Disappearing” sets Warnick well apart from his peers.