Lives are literally on the line in Vivian Qu’s genre hybrid Girls on Wire, a surprisingly gritty study of people left behind or living in the margins that fuses gangster realism with social drama and leavens both with a dash of unexpected humor. A key player in the unfolding story is Chinese cinema itself, played by Xiangshan Film City, a dream factory with the emphasis on factory. Though it ends with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, Girls on Wire takes a very sober view of life in industrialized China, and all the myriad unfairnesses that exist there.

The first of the two protagonists we meet is Tian Tian (Liu Haocun), a country girl kept in captivity by unknown abductors who keep her dosed up with heroin to keep her quiet. When she escapes, killing a goon in the process, she decides to visit her estranged cousin Fang Di (We Qi), who works at a major movie studio. To get in, she infiltrates a queue of costumed extras who marvel at her rags, the dried blood and bruises on her face (“Did you do you own make-up?”). It’s a big place, however, with dozens of productions shooting at any one time, each with its own cast and crew. Exactly where is Fang Di? Nobody seems to know, much less care. “You’ve a better chance of winning the lottery,” Tian Tian is told.

The expectation in Tian Tian’s mind is that Fang Di is some kind of movie star now, but that’s far from the case. In a more literal manifestation of the film’s title, Fang Di is a stuntwoman who specializes in wire work; when we first see her, she’s being whipped around for the purposes of a wuxia film, wielding a massive sword, dressed in black and fighting off a dozen assailants. She’s doing a great job, but no one will ever know it: after each scene, the film’s real star is brought in to take her place. The director, an arrogant hipster in shades, takes Fang Di’s professionalism for granted, nearly killing her in an excruciating scene that sees her yanked, take after take, from a freezing cold river.

What Tian Tian doesn’t know is that Fang Di is a prisoner too, trapped in a long-standing spiral of debt that is coming to the crunch. (“Madam Yang’s money is long overdue,” she is told. “This is your last warning.”) To this end, two gangsters and — somewhat randomly — a hotpot chef from her hometown have been dispatched to find her, a strange trio who get swept up in the madness of a film set and end up as background artists in a war film (“Do you know Zhang Yimou?” the over-excited hotpot chef asks the A.D.).

The meat of Qu’s film, however, is in the backstory to the two cousins being reunited, starting with Tian Tian and Fang Di as children. Tian Tian has been semi-adopted by Fang Di’s parents, who run a clothing factory and loyally support her bone-idle, junk-sick father. The two girls become close, with Fang Di looking after the wild child until she just can’t do it anymore, so when Tian Tian becomes a young, unfit mother, she cuts all ties — explaining the distance kept until now.

There’s a lot to keep up in the air here, with or without wires, and Qu’s film doesn’t quite fly, mostly because it spends so much of its time in extremes — when it’s grim it’s really grim, and when it’s sweet it’s a little too sweet, and when it’s trying to be funny, well, it’s trying just a little too hard.

There is something substantial at its heart, however, and the subtext of Girls on Wire is more powerful than what passes as the plot. The deliberate invocation of “movie magic” is key here, and Qu’s bleak view of mainstream filmmaking as factory farming isn’t so much a critique of Chinese cinema as a metaphor for the way working-class people’s dreams are fed to them by the demands of consumerist society and don’t reflect their actual needs. Does Madam Yang, the bogeywoman of the piece, even exist? The message of this highly moral story is that she doesn’t have to; the very real threat of penury is intimidating enough.

Title: Girls on Wire (Xiang fei de nv hai)
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Vivian Qu
Cast: Liu Haocun, Wen Qi, Zhang Youhao, Zhou You, Peng Jing
Sales agent: Films Boutique
Running time: 1 hr 45 mins