This year I will help out again in blogging the Berlinale, especially as our Choco Parfait is on the wrong continent this time.
The Berlinale always has been, is and probably always will be a political festival: Founded in 1950 in a bombed-out West Berlin, surrounded by an increasingly hostile Soviet army, witnessing the 1953 Uprising being slain down one day before that year’s festival or having the Berlin Wall built shortly after the 1961 festival kinda does leave its mark. (That paragraph is shamelessly paraphrased from our dear gay, bearlike reigning mayor Klaus Wowereit’s speech at the Berlinale opening ceremony I watched minutes ago…) With that in mind it’s not a surprising move to choose Taiwan and the PRC as a topic for the opening movie.
Tuan Yuan (Apart Together, ??)
People’s Republic of China 2009, Wang Quan’an, 93?
Liu Yansheng, a Guomindang veteran soldier is finally able to visit Shanghai, after being forced in 1949 to leave behind his great love Qiao Yu’e who was pregnant with his child. He is greeted by the slightly hesitant Yu’e and the very outgoing and generous Lu Shenmin, her husband who ironically was a PLA soldier marching into Shanghai the same day Yansheng and the rest of the GMD had to retreat to Taiwan. He brought up Yansheng’s son as his own and had two more kids with Yu’e. Yansheng also remarried and had a child, but now that his wife has been dead for three years he decides to take Yu’e back with him. After Yu’e, who still loves Yansheng, warms up to the idea they bring it up to Shenmin who surprisingly agrees to let her go. Of course, things start to get ugly after confronting their children…
Interestingly, the title in the opening credits was written in traditional characters, even though it was a PRC-produced movie. Also, is this the start of a new trend? A Chinese movie, about one woman and two men, one of which (the present husband) has a heart too big for his own good. OK, that’s about all parallels I could find between this and Zuo You and I think my association was influenced by the fact that it was at the same place, I was similarly alone and it was the first movie of the respective Berlinale.
Surprisingly(?) the political dimension of the topic was almost completely left out. One moment where it came up, was during a guided tour for the veterans, where the guide was very quick to point out that construction was underway for a building 100 metres taller than the Taipei 101 (evoking a big laugh from the audience). Other than this kind of self-ironic scene, there really were no political commentaries, which greatly helped to focus on the interactions between the three main characters. The movie showed in great detail the dynamics between the suddenly reappearing lost love, the loyal good husband and the woman hopelessly torn between her first love and the man who gave up his promising political career and many other things out of unquestioning love towards her. The actors really captured the conflicting emotions of the three main characters and the strongest scenes are the ones in which one or more of them take the lead. In all this, again quite ironically, the funniest scene is about Yu’e and Shenmin struggling with the local bureaucrats to get their divorce which results in them actually getting married, because they had no marriage certificate and this was the only way to obtain one. At the same time, watching this unexpectedly funny scene plain hurts, for obvious reasons.
Unfortunately the story of Yansheng’s seemingly no-good son (in contrast to his Taiwanese son, who is a successful businessman) was not brought out more and the story of Na-na, the granddaughter of Yu’e and Shenmin who was in charge of showing Yansheng around as she was the only non-hostile family member also seemed kind of hollow and pointless to the movie. So while it had some really strong character interaction and great actors there were parts where it definitely didn’t live up to its potential.
PS: Please forgive this convoluted mess of a post. I didn’t write an English text for who knows how long and it’s almost 3AM right now…
Oh my God, this makes me want to watch the movie now! Especially now that I want to see how it ended, ahhh! Hahaha. Somehow the premise sounds incredibly intriguing, but if the film has so many pointless elements as you said, I wonder how much can actually be happening in mere 93 minutes.
Nevertheless, this feels like a much better opening movie than last year’s to me, and I will definitely try to get my hands onto it.
I may have been unclear about that: While it has those elements, they actually don’t take up much of the screentime. So if anything, giving them more time would have made them less pointless.
If I had to decide between giving them more time while sacrificing the main story or leaving them as-is, I would do the latter though. The movie could have been 15-20 minutes longer, really.
The Zeit has yet again written a nice article about the film, it makes me want to watch it even more! I wish the film really would have become a Kammerspiel with every single scene taking place at the eating table. It would have been perfect, I am sure.
To me, the story itself sounds like a lot of things could be said, as I imagine it to be really beautiful. Perhaps I’m just the most interest in the main characters and the dynamics between them too. It makes me wonder how I am going to be when I’m old. XD