“Divorce” is written in the traditional manner of social storytelling, it depicts middle-class Beijing officials with their worries and passions. With a considerable amount of irony, small people are depicted, pretending to be important people, their boring life with unloved wives, timid dreams of a different, “poetic” reality. But events speed up: the son of one of the characters is arrested, and efforts to rescue him lead to the death of another. Irony recedes into the background, the figures become multidimensional, human features appear through the masks that seem firmly fused with the faces. Then worries become a thing of the past, the river of life flows along its previous channel. And only the main character can no longer live in the old way.