This knockout debut feature from Chinese writer-director Lin Jianjie is like some kind of cinematic kinetic mobile, such as the ones artist Alexander Calder designed in the last century; it’s so exquisitely balanced that it’s able to keep reconfiguring itself with the merest breeze into a whole new arrangement of shapes that’s just as pleasing and abstract as the last. Precision and random chance, freestyle inspiration and formal craft are all in constant play here. That perfectly complements the story itself, a parable about a tricky space – the family unit – where talent, ambition and the lottery of genetics and luck all dance around one another, held in place by gravity and desire. It really is that good, and well-worth seeing in a cinema, not just on a small screen at home, so as to appreciate Zhang Jiahao’s sculptural cinematography and the sparse palette of composer Toke Brorson Odin’s score.
The story takes place in an unnamed Chinese city; outside, we see glimpses of Chengdu, Hangzhou and Beijing, but most of the action is inside a tastefully appointed flat, all glassy surfaces and privacy screens made of stylised foliage. This is where 15-year-old Tu Wei (Lin Muran) lives with his upper-middle-class parents who are never named. Dad is a highly regarded biological scientist (Zu Feng), and mum (Guo Ke-Yu) a former flight attendant, which means her language skills allowed her to travel.
When an incident at school brings together naturally lazy Wei and intensely focused classmate Yan Shuo (Sun Xilun, seductively blank), Wei takes Shuo home to hang out and play video games. Wei’s parents, especially his mum, are charmed by Shuo’s respectful manners and ill-disguised lack of cultural capital. The way he drowns a dish in extra soy sauce is a tell that he’s definitely from a lower social class. But his commitment to his studies is a quality they wish they’d see some sign of in oafish Wei, who really just wants to be a jock and pursue a career in fencing, despite his father’s insistence he should study abroad. When it emerges that Shuo, whose mother is dead, is often physically abused by his drunk of a dad, whom we never meet, the Tus bring him even closer into their tiny fold. But are they being conned? Are we, the viewers? Is this an Asian version of The Talented Mr Ripley or Pasolini’s Theorem, or a story of striving as classical as any 19th-century bildungsroman? Right up to the very last scene, it could go any of the aforementioned ways.
It turns out that director Lin, until very recently, was pursuing a career as a geneticist, which makes it all the more tempting to read a scientific detachment into the observation of these characters. Indeed, he sometimes uses a circular digital matte to limit the view as if we were looking at the characters through a microscope or telescope, like the cell samples we also see footage of throughout. That detachment opens up the film’s opaque engagement with class and crucially the way China’s one-child policy, now relaxed, shapes the dynamics of family life. But this works well just as simple drama, directed and performed immaculately, and as a glorious promise of films to come from Lin.
Source: theguardian.com
