Dì jiǔ tiān cháng
Wang Xiaoshuai (2019)
Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son explores relationships within and between two Chinese families, and their differing fortunes, from a point in the 1980s to approaching the present day. Wang thereby illustrates the political, cultural and socio-economic changes that have occurred in China in the course of recent decades. The timeframe more or less corresponds to the lifetime of the country’s one-child policy, which sharpens the personal tragedy at the heart of the story. So much is clear from this long (185-minute), mournful, absorbing (and widely admired) drama. But I found its largely non-linear narrative, with flashbacks to different points of the past rubbing shoulders with each other, very hard to follow. When I read about So Long, My Son afterwards, I discovered that I’d misunderstood a crucial element of the plot. It’s not worth going into the details of how – or writing extensively about a film that I failed to get the hang of. So just a couple of points …
There’s no denying my difficulty in understanding So Long, My Son was partly a consequence of the cast’s unfamiliarity and ethnicity. With western actors, I’d at least have had a better handle on when things were happening. Wang Jingchun as Yaojun and Yong Mei as Liyun, the central married couple in the story, play their characters throughout, with the aid of changing hair colour, make-up etc. I’m still not sure whether the same goes for all the significant characters (other than those who are children in the early years). The two leads won the Silver Bear acting prizes at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. It’s impossible not to be impressed by the conviction and consistency of both performances. But any larger appreciation of their acting is invalidated by misinterpreting events in the story to the extent that I did.
Some things I did get right made me think the writer-director’s screenplay contained its fair share of conventional melodrama – a suicide attempt; a deathbed reunion and rapprochement; a post-funeral admission of a long-held guilty secret, followed by a revelation of something the admitting party still doesn’t knew. But So Long, My Son has visual authority throughout (the DP is Hyun Seok Kim) and plenty of resonant, expressive images. When Yaojun and Liyun make a return visit to the home they left many years previously, Wang Xiaoshuai’s camera repeatedly concentrates on a straggle of long grass outside the apartment building. The couple then visit their late son’s hillside grave above the city. The first thing they do there is clear away the grass that’s grown around the headstone.
17 December 2019
