Sydney Film Festival VI :: Apart Together: From Eternity to Her

I met a Taiwanese philosopher last year. For real. He asked me a lot of questions about Australia (“Where are your Aborigines?”) and gave me his take on the difference between “Asian man and European man.” You see, he told me, when an Asian man drinks, he gets furious and wants to fight everybody. A European man just drinks and drinks until he falls down, and he will later die early from brain damage.

In Quanan Wang’s Apart Together, we get a great scene of a Chinese man getting drunk and getting furious and wanting to fight everybody. It happens around midway through the film, where Lu Shenmin (Xu Caigen) finally drops his unflappable accommodating and lets loose on the unusual situation. Shenmin’s wife, Qiao Yu-e (Lisa Lu) has received a letter from her long lost lover, Liu Yansheng (Ling Feng). He fled for Taiwan in the final days of the Kuomintang in Shanghai in 1949. He married during his exile, his wife’s now dead, and he’s coming back to Shanghai for the first time in fifty years.

His arrival is touted in a deadpan scene, where Yu-e’s granddaughter reads the letter aloud over a meal of soup, slurping her way through a monotone delivery. The abandoned son is there, Yu-e’s husband, their kids, everyone. What does he want? He wants her, she wants him, Shenmin gives it all his blessing. Incongruity is the film’s dramatic motor, a social comedy cum odd divorce farce.

I remember having to get a visa to go from one terminal in Beijing airport to the other; imagine the difficulty Shenmin and Yu-e encounter when they attempt to get a divorce, only to discover that they’re not considered married because they cannot produce the right papers. And so these common-law partners go to another room in the bureaucratic building to get married, so they can go back to get a divorce. (Need I mention I was reading Kafka during my transit?) This scene is built for obvious comedy, but Shenmin’s smile in the obligatory wedding photo is pure genius.

(Lisa Lu, looking nothing like her character. She doesn't smile like this for her photo.)

Wang knows that he has acting gold in his three elderly leads. Lisa Lu, Ling Feng, and Xu Caigen have all had half-century long careers in films, and it’s a total pleasure to watch them hit their marks with a tilt of the head, a lingering look, and, in the film’s best scene, singing over drinks. Ling Feng, spry and brown, plays off Lisa Lu’s still determination, offering possibilities that she has the power to follow or reject.

But Xu Caigen (on the left, below) is my boy: Talk of his strong appetite, buying the big crabs for their faraway visitor, soaking his feet in hot water, and, w/r/t/ the scene I began with, lashing out against his current situation and his needlessly penny-pinching path to get there, he completely steals the film. A Chinese student told me his name wouldn’t be recognised by many, but his face would, as he has played supporting roles in over fifty films. He’s hilarious, arresting, deferential, explosive. Like I said, he’s my boy.

Of course, this film is a parable about new China. Numerous skyscrapers exceed the frame, there is the metonymic tension of Taiwan v the mainland, visitors go on a tour of Shanghai where significant buildings are compared to international counterparts (the Sydney Harbour Bridge gets a guernsey), and a granddaughter’s fiancé is heading to America to study. But this is all handled in a muted way—if this is a necessary condition of Chinese film production I don’t know.

I’ve been told you can get underground films in Chinese bars that take on government dogma. If you can’t already tell from my appeals to anecdotal orientalism, I know little about mainland Chinese cinema, other than the big films of the last 20 or so years. I know they break their cinema up into generations, but I couldn’t tell you what number they’re up to. I’d guess 8^th. I do know this film won the Golden Bear at Berlin, where there must have been some resonance of a nation or a people internally and arbitrarily divided. But for me, this film’s significance comes from observing consummate cinematographic performance. And this all about what’s taking place in a room, not beyond its walls.

Screen memories: “ohhing" at a bus tour guide’s drone; a banquet drowning in the rain; the wedding photo

I think this song is sung in the great drinking scene: