I too couldn’t have let the girl die

Zuo You

What can I say. First of all, I don’t recommend this film to anyone except Thomas, because it’s sooooo slow. I haven’t seen such a slow movie for quite awhile and it annoys the hell out of me that Chinese movies made for the European audience is always so immensely slow-paced. But apart from the slowness, the movie delivers on every aspect in my opinion.

I was very suspicious at the beginning, because I loathe “Beijing Bicycle” with a passion and I warned my parents about the film. Luckily, we had a lot of fun watching the film together, especially since my parents recognized all the actors from other movies except for the female protagonist (who, by the way, was also the weakest of the four of them in my opinion). But now I am glad that I have seen this.

First of all, I can see how the screenplay has won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. The story (and the characters) is the movie’s strongest point. Just like “Beijing Bicycle”, the film is also quite a portrait of Chinese society, and one aspect of it is the infinite love for one’s own child. Every character in this film is so disturbingly realistic. I would have acted exactly the same as them, and I feel exactly the same as them. I suppose this makes me rather Chinese when it comes to the topic of family.
Thus, I especially liked how they interacted with the child. When they were “playing airplane” by lifting up the girl and running with her, my parents said that I was just like that when I was small. All these details in their lives is sooo Chinese, it’s great and I must say that the director does have quite an eye for the portrait of everyday lives.

Directing-wise, the film has quite a few great details. (It also has a Totoro as decoration! XD) I love how the film played with “left” and “right” and used it at some crucial parts in the movie. The composition of the picture was brilliant at times in my opinion, for example when the TV was shown in the mirror, or the way the eating scenes at the very end were shot. If it were not so incredibly slow, technically this is quite a mature film in my opinion and the direction conveys the characters feelings.

The problem with slow-paced movies is not necessarily the slowness itself. Although I do think that too many “mood shots” actually destroys the mood, because I tend to want to fall asleep instead of feeling suspense, I think that the problem mainly lies in something else: A movie is just that long. There are so many feelings involved with these 4 human beings, and I feel like there are so many more things that they could have shown, I wanted to know more about the characters, more about their lives, other aspects of how they feel. I don’t just want to see some frowning faces for minutes, I actually want to see what they are thinking. To me, these frowning faces are not just ‘subtlety’ and ‘art’ or whatever, to me, it just looks like the director was taking the easy way out because he didn’t know what to make them say. More conversations or actions could have made the film deeper, but instead one to the accumulation of way too many mood shots. I was missing “content” a little bit in this movie, and that’s all due to its slowness.
Also, when people move slower and speak slower than I would in reality, I feel alienated to them. But that’s not what the film is about, you are supposed to feel with them. I guess this is the great thing about books: One can skip over Tolkien’s descriptions of landscapes and move onto the interesting action.

Finally, I am glad that I have found a poster picture that is suitable for the movie. I think that the official English poster is horrible and doesn’t do justice to it at all. The worst scene of the whole movie was the sex scene at the end, so utterly tasteless. But the interaction between the characters was what makes this little film so precious.