Big Little Things: Venice Film Review

With Big Little Things, Michelle Zhou tells a dour and bittersweet lesbian coming-out story that happened in northeastern China during COVID.

Set against the backdrop of COVID, the film follows a lesbian couple seeking to bring their relationship into the open, as Lei Xiao (Cuishan Liang), an admissions consultant who handles overseas study planning and application ghostwriting, is afraid to tell her parents the truth. She lives with her carefree, straightforward girlfriend Bei Li (Jianing Sun), who is working with a lecherous art collector on her upcoming exhibition. Although Lei dyes her hair pastel pink, she is not as unfettered as her appearance might suggest. The two share a homey, cosy apartment in Beijing, and get into little spats over trivia, much like any other couple would.

As Chinese New Year approaches, Bei returns to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province near the Russian border, to reunite with her family. It is an occasion when relatives and parents always nag single grown-ups to get married, and this has naturally become an immense source of pressure for Lei. In order to reassure her parents, Bei comes up with a plan: she brings her client, Yao Chen (Bin Yu), a tattoo artist hoping to study furniture design at RISD, to pretend to be her boyfriend, bluffing her way through her family’s gawking and pointing. Built around this light-hearted premise, the film soon introduces us to her manipulative, officious mother Chunli Wu and her staid, reserved father Lao Xiao (a surprisingly non-professional actor Hai Yu, who vividly embodies a middle-aged paternal figure).

Beyond the ostensibly celebratory New Year’s Eve feast, the sword of Damocles hangs over Lei’s head. Now Yao has to learn to play the part of a real boyfriend, helping out with cooking in the kitchen and toasting the elders at the dinner table like a proper future son-in-law. The only thing is that he doesn’t realise he will soon fall into the trap they set in motion at the beginning, which sends the story in an unexpectedly dour direction. When Lei nonchalantly lets Yao know that his mission is “over”, Bei travels to Harbin to meet her, but what comes next is trouble from both sides: Lei has to confront her mother’s confusion and a misunderstanding with Bei, and that’s the moment when she realises the truth of Yao’s earlier remark: “Some things are impossible to hide from your parents.”

Zhou picks up snippets from two girls’ ordinary lives, slicing a small yet precise slit that reflects the dilemma of being a “good-lesbian-daughter” in a modern Chinese family. She refrains from turning it into the kind of coming-out drama one might expect, instead using an exceptionally calm and restrained tone to portray the characters she’s so familiar with. Those conversations about employer provident funds, marriage and childbirth are old chestnuts for the middle class, but beneath this playful surface lies a stern reality about economics and social welfare during COVID.

Watching the boundless world of white, we see the father and daughter sitting opposite each other in an empty restaurant. It is one of the few days after the New Year’s celebrations, when everything feels stagnant and void. The ice rink is closed, and Lei can no longer escape from her father’s soft gaze. It is the first and last time we see Xiao so talkative, but it is within that particular silence between words that we capture the most indescribable poignancy following a familial rupture. What makes the story even more touching is that the actor playing Xiao is actually the father of Chun Yu, producer of the film and Zhou’s partner. As Yu reports in an interview, his father’s decision to take on the role was driven by the desire to “rescue himself”, which adds a profoundly personal dimension to the making of the work.

An up-and-coming arthouse actress, Liang once again plays a daughter in Big Little Things, but this role is markedly different from the one she played in Shanghai Daughter. She delivers a disarmingly nuanced performance as Lei, creating a heartfelt contrast with her co-star Sun, who gives an equally convincing, if more forlorn, performance. Although Hu appears only briefly, her striking performance leaves an exceedingly disquieting impression, one that is both heart-gripping and deeply relatable.

Harbin functions as more than just a setting, with its aloof vibe and frigid environment leaving the characters adrift in an emotionally desolate space. The film’s references to the dreadful pandemic lend a sense of precarity, as the crisis gradually affects the characters’ living conditions and their understanding of relationships.

Big Little Things does not end with a sugarcoated happy ending, nor does it turn out to be a tragic drama. It refuses to yield or give anything away; rather, through Lei’s decision to finally escape her parents’ control, the film becomes a bittersweet farewell to her family, at least for the time being, before their expectations harden like frozen ground beneath the snow.

Big Little Things (Huangyan Shenghuo) had its World Premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival on September 11, 2026.