The Farewell (Dir Lulu Wang, 1h 38m)
In a way, it is remarkable that we have The Farewell to begin with-based upon Wang's own life, and indeed upon the cancer diagnosis of her own grandmother, this film's very existence was regarded as unbankable. Wang found herself, in her attempts to bring this extremely personal project to life, in a no-man's-land between Western cinema, which regarded the entire project as "too Asian", and tried to add identifiable Western characters, and a Chinese cinema that, stunningly, tried to do the same, daubing the film "too American". That a film almost entirely, aside from bookending sequences in New York, set in China, almost entirely in Chinese, with a Chinese cast, exists in 2019, not in the arthouse cinemas of major cities, but in the multiplexes of South East England and beyond, is nothing short of a minor miracle.
Yet, this feeling of belonging to neither Chinese homeland, nor American outland, is essentially the struggle that Billi finds herself in for the majority of the film, in an impressively nuanced performance from Awkwafina. Against her relatives' traditionalist approach essentially forbidding them from telling Nai-Nai of her cancer diagnosis, and her likely impending illness and death, Billi rails against this unfairness, this sense that she will be unable to say goodbye, and clashes against her relatives, including her father, Jian (Tzi Ma), in their ever-escalating attempts to keep the diagnosis from her, including arranging an entirely fictious wedding to bring the family together one more time. It is her uncle, Haibin (a sterling performance by Jiang Yongbo, who forms a nigh-perfect double-act with Ma's Jian, particularly in a scene where the two of them get drunk), who summarises it best, noting that the family have to carry the weight of the diagnosis, in the form of the secret they all keep from her, rather than Nai-Nai.
But Billi's character is altogether more complex than this clash of old and new, of American "self", where the individual is all-important, against Chinese "whole", where their role in the family defines them. In several scenes, she butts heads with the parents who took her away from China as a young girl, away from this sense of the family to the America where her family knew nobody. Her parents themselves are contradictory, her father in particular torn between telling his beloved mother that their time together is growing short, and the dutiful son keeping the news from her to avoid her harm. Billi's mother, for her part, is almost dismissive, in a couple of scenes, including the expertly shot, quintessentially homely-feeling scenes involving meals, of the country of her birth, including her distaste and decidedly western attitude to mourning in China, whilst waxing lyrical on the kindness of Americans.
Billi is, in short, a young woman who is liminal to both places she calls home-in one memorable sequence, largely shot through the windows of a car, she mourns the loss of her now demolished home, of the things she has lost, including Nai-Nai's husband, who "simply vanished", how Nai-Nai herself is practically her last link to the country of her birth. Even in the family that flock together, we get the sense that, without her, the family would drift apart across the world. Yet, we see that she is not altogether comfortable in America-at several points she confides to her mother that, having failed to get a scholarship, she wants to stay in China. Even her status as a polyglot-despite nimbly sliding between Chinese and American-accented English early in the film-the language barrier, is, indeed, smartly added in several scenes to add to the upkeep of the intrigue she admits throughout the film that her Chinese is poor.
Certainly, this is a film that deals with national identity as much as it deals with mortality-Nai-Nai practically stands in for Billi's, and indeed much of her family's Chinese identity, and the film almost critiques, when we do leave Nai-Nai's home, the nature of modern China, the loss of the traditional in the face of the modern, making the intimately shot meals, in which the camera moves around the table, visually different from the often locked, or painterly framed shots elsewhere in the film. Indeed, this entire film is beautifully shot, from the neon lit night scenes to the use of reflections-the film's single defining moment is a genuinely stunning POV shot, towards the very end of the film, used to devastating effect
There's a homely claustrophobia in a couple of moments, and meals have never looked this intrinsically key, this important a marker of a national identity, in a work of cinema since Scorsese and Copppola's Italio-American-set films of the 1970s and 1980s. Nai-Nai, for her part, is a kindly, if fearsome figure, at points, chiding her grown sons, doting on her awkward grandson who is due to get married, and, in beautifully shot scenes, spending time with her granddaughter-for a character the film revolves around, she is its greatest asset, a performance of small, perfectly acted gestures, from an encouraging early morning scene, where her determination, even in her old age, shines through, to her warmth, her gently chiding tone, and her utter devotion to the family that hold a secret from her.
Perhaps, though, the film's strongest asset is its tone. In another director's hands, this could have been maudlin, a film focusing too much on death than the life before it, or overly sentimental. Doubtless, there is a sweetness, a delicacy, particularly in the wedding banquet that drifts from elegiac to comic, to retrospective, in which old comrades of Nai-Nai wistfully contemplate the lives they could have shared with her, in which this ailing woman is centre and commanding, moving with ease between the many extended parts of her family, before she admonishes her drunk grandson for looking depressed in his wedding photograph.
Elsewhere, the comedy comes thick and fast-there's one sequence, after which the family have managed to convince Nai-Nai she is perfectly well, in which the film slows to a Tarantinoesque crawl as Billi and family walk towards camera in slow motion-it is so unexpected, the choice of soundtrack so unfittingly fitting, that you cannot help but laugh. Another sequence involves Billi and her mother having a intense debate whilst the latter is trying to undress her husband, who eventually rolls over, complaining about the noise, whilst the general good-natured bickering, particularly in those singular dinner scenes, rolls back and forth so naturally you cannot help but wonder if these scenes were entirely adlibbed.
But without this gentleness, both in comedy and in drama, this film would not have the warmth it has, would not gel these two disparate halves, these two radically different approaches to mortality, to living and dying, as well as it does- it closes, perhaps in the way it needs to, with a compromise between these two worlds, in Billi coming to terms not only with her bi-culturality, but also in these two radically different ways of living, and ending, a life. The Farewell feels like a vital meditation upon living with a foot in two cultures, and few films before it have captured this with such care, warmth, and wit before, and few films have left me as utterly in love with cinema as a medium, as this tale of life, and how to end it, does
Rating: Must See: Personal Recommended.
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