"Sweet Food City"

Mei shi cun (China)

A Time-Story Movie Works production. (International sales: Time-Story, Dalian, China.) Produced, directed, written, edited by Gao Wendong.

With: Quan Chao, Huang Jingbo, Li Qiong, Hou Xizhong.

Enthusiasts of miserabilist, minimalist Asian digital filmmaking will get all they expect, in spades, from "Sweet Food City," second in a planned trilogy of works by thirtysomething writer-director Gao Wendong about denizens of his native Dalian City, northeast China. Story-of-sorts, about an unemployed drifter, his father and his hooker g.f. moping around in the titular semi-slum, says nothing new about marginalized characters or the underbelly of China's economic miracle. Beyond certain fests that deem such fare "progressive," pic has no audience.

Sweet Food City is a shabby concrete neighborhood, ripe for demolition, that was thrown up during the '80s and is inhabited by lowlifes, prostitutes, rootless youths and vendors, mostly migrants. Bottle-blonde young hooker Tingting (Huang Jingbo) bumps into out-of-work Sanbao (Quan Chao), and the pair eventually move into an empty apartment with Sanbao's dad (Li Qiong), a garbage collector. Nothing much happens amid the slow-moving, semi-docu portrait of everyday life, though Tingting skips town for a while because of some history with a gangster. Dialogue is skimpy; sole flash of real emotion, an argument between the two lovers, is simply corny. Well-composed digital lensing catches the district's flavor.