Bié Gàosù Tā
Lulu Wang (2019)
Writer-director Lulu Wang’s comedy-drama has at least three things in common with last year’s hit romcom Crazy Rich Asians. First, the cast includes the rapper Awkwafina, this time in the lead. Second, the heroine is a young Asian American, living in New York, who travels to Asia for a wedding. Third, it’s a critical as well as a commercial hit, with the kind reception from reviewers owing plenty to the characters’ ethnicity: for some critics, this seems to place the film above reproach. The Farewell is certainly more engaging than Crazy Rich Asians and, on the surface, more demanding. The audience has to read subtitles (there’s more Mandarin than English dialogue) and Wang seems to be exploring weighty themes – mortality, cultural difference and alienation. She does so superficially, though. The story is based on her own experiences and The Farewell is an example of a familiar movie syndrome. When film-makers work with autobiographical material, they often assume the deep meaning it has for them will automatically be reflected in what they put on the screen.
Lulu Wang’s alter ego is Billi Wang, whose parents, Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Jian (Diana Lin), emigrated from China to America when she was six years old. Now in her late twenties, Billi is an aspiring writer. She learns, early in the film, that her application for a Guggenheim Fellowship has been unsuccessful. Soon afterwards, she also learns, from her parents, that her paternal grandmother in China – ‘Nai Nai’ (Zhao Shuzhen), with whom Billi’s in regular phone contact – is terminally ill: diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, she’s not expected to survive more than a few months. Billi’s cousin Hao Hao (Chen Han) is about to marry a Japanese girl, Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara), in the family’s native city of Changchun, where Billi’s grandmother still lives. The occasion offers a pretext for a last family reunion – a farewell to Nai Nai, although she won’t know that. Her sister (Lu Hong), who received the cancer diagnosis on her behalf on their latest hospital visit, assured Nai Nai that spots on her lung had now been confirmed as ‘benign shadows’.
Billi is shocked by both the news of her grandmother’s illness and her relatives’ determination to keep Nai Nai in the dark. (The film’s Mandarin title Bié Gàosù Tā translates literally as ‘Don’t tell her’ or ‘Don’t let her know’.) Against the wishes of her parents, who fear their daughter will spill the beans, Billi joins them in Changchun for the days leading up to the wedding. Although well aware they’d behave differently in similar circumstances in America, Haiyan and Jian, no less than the family members who’ve spent their lives in Asia, accept the Chinese cultural imperative of deluding Nai Nai. As Haiyan’s elder brother Haibin (Jiang Yongbo) explains when Billi starts to argue the toss, reassuring the old woman that she isn’t seriously ill spares her the ordeal of coping with an imminent death sentence. The burden is shouldered instead by those who love her.
It’s frustrating that her uncle’s words are enough to silence the free-thinking and strong-willed Billi. Lulu Wang doesn’t allow her to suggest to Haibin, for example, that keeping the truth from Nai Nai is both unfair to her and adds to the emotional pressures on her relatives in the know. We see those pressures in action: when he thanks Nai Nai in a speech at his son’s wedding, Haibin breaks down; the bridegroom, portrayed as a bit of a twerp until this point, is so overcome that he can hardly pull himself together for the taking of a family group photograph. Yet Billi reacts to all this by shifting to when-in-Rome conformance. At the end of the wedding reception, Nai Nai mentions she’s sent a neighbour to the hospital to pick up X-ray results for her. Billi exits and makes a visually clichéd through-the-streets dash to get to the hospital first. She arrives there to discover from Nai Nai’s neighbour that she’s already collected the results but no harm done: the neighbour tells Billi she’s (conveniently) illiterate. Billi and others then rush the documents to a copy centre, where an obliging man agrees to amend the text of the medical report to repeat the ‘benign shadows’ diagnosis.
The X-rays were done when, three days before the wedding, Nai Nai was so unwell that the family took her to hospital. This leads to one of The Farewell’s strongest scenes. Nai Nai is examined by Dr Song (Liu Zhuying) who, when he learns that Billi lives in New York, eagerly tells her that he was educated in England. They converse in English about Nai Nai’s condition. The old woman is oblivious, not only to what they’re saying but also because she’s reflecting happily on what an eligible husband for Billi the good-looking young doctor would be. Song endorses the family’s decision not to put Nai Nai in the picture, telling Billi something similar happened with his own father. The doctor nevertheless decides on a X-ray, opening the door to the possibility – as subsequent events show – that Nai Nai might discover the truth.
Billi’s actions in the later stages are dictated by Lulu Wang’s prioritising instant dramatic impact in favour of deeper credibility. This becomes typical of her approach more generally. For example, Billi learns that Nai Nai herself kept her late husband’s terminal illness a secret from him until just before his death – yet there’s never a suggestion that the grandmother, who’s nothing if not with it, suspects she may now be on the receiving end of similar subterfuge. This wouldn’t be problematic if Wang implied that Nai Nai was so fearful she might be dying that it suited her to ignore the possibility. But that’s not the case: she’s evidently concerned enough about her health to want to get hold of the X-ray results even on the day of the wedding, an event that Nai Nai seems to have been largely responsible for organising.
Lulu Wang uses the family’s concealment and Billi’s problems with it as a main illustration of the differences between East and West, between collectivist and individualistic philosophies. In fact, it’s just about the only illustration. The streets of Changchun are unsurprisingly quieter than those of NYC. During one of the several family meals, there’s some robust discussion of the relative merits of PRC vs USA in creating wealth and enlarging opportunity. But The Farewell isn’t one of those films in which a protagonist’s return to their roots causes them to reappraise their life and values. All that sparks Billi to emotional life is the consequences of keeping silent about death – she also criticises her parents for not letting her know when her grandfather was dying. (I wasn’t clear how old she was at the time.) We don’t get any idea of how Billi compares this silence with her own decision not to admit an uncomfortable truth: it’s only late in the story that she reveals – and only to Nai Nai – that she’s been turned down for the Guggenheim.
Wang describes rituals both domestic and public: mealtimes; a family outing, complete with a supporting cast of professional criers, to Nai Nai’s husband’s grave; and, of course, the wedding – where the diminutive, largely silent Hao Hao and Aiko have the amusing look of the bride and groom miniatures on a (Western) wedding cake. These sequences are all interesting to watch, even though the interest derives as much from the quasi-documentary as the dramatic content. But the visuals aren’t technically impressive: perhaps my poor eyes were to blame but the images were sometimes a bit muzzy.
Awkwafina, very different from in her scene-stealing, wacky turn in Crazy Rich Asians, is good enough – though more committed than she is varied. Her face expresses what her character is thinking clearly, even obviously: sitting at the family dinner table, Billi is too conspicuously anxious. The Farewell is greatly enlivened by Zhao Shuzhen’s performance as the dying matriarch. Zhao’s Nai Nai is both fragile and feisty. Billi’s mother (also well played) is right when she reminds her daughter how much Nai Nai wants to be in charge. The old woman’s loyal, long-suffering sister and Nai Nai’s elderly, henpecked lodger (Yang Xuejian) are often on the receiving end of her sharp tongue. Above her bed, there’s a black-and-white photograph of Nai Nai and, presumably, her late husband in their youth, and in Chinese Red Army uniform. In a conversation at the wedding reception, one of a trio of old men, former Red Army colleagues, tells Nai Nai how much he wanted to marry her back in the day. Zhao Shuhzen manages to make this personal history ring perfectly true. She conveys a sense of a rich life lived.
The Farewell, according to its theatrical release poster and a legend on screen at the start of the film, is ‘based on an actual lie’. What happens right at the end makes clear, however, that it departs from the facts of Lulu Wang’s experience in at least one major way. It’s standard practice for biopics to show as a postscript either photographs or video recordings of the actual people who inspired the story. Wang shows the real Nai Nai doing the physical exercises we’ve seen Zhao Shuhzen doing a couple of times. The video is accompanied by the information that, four years after her diagnosis, the real Nai Nai is still alive. There’s no denying this delivers an unexpected happy ending but the effect is disorienting – and not just because, even though Nai Nai’s fictional counterpart doesn’t die on screen, the implication of the film’s closing image is that she has passed.
The final revelation doesn’t exactly invalidate the tale Wang’s been telling but it qualifies in a big way what The Farewell has taken as a given and depended on, almost entirely, for its dramatic motor. The real Nai Nai’s survival is such miraculous good news that it momentarily eclipses what we’ve been watching. Only as you leave the cinema do you start asking the questions it naturally raises. In reality, was the terminal diagnosis wrong – or is Wang’s grandmother still expected to die soon? If the latter, when was it thought right to tell her the truth about her condition? You can’t help concluding that what Lulu Wang has presented as an irresistible moral obligation in the society she portrays may be more flexible than she’s led us to believe.
26 September 2019
