Viewers who remember Xie Dong’s first film and FEFJ debut The Coldest Day (2004) might be surprised by his second feature One Summer With You. The new feature’s elegiac take on adolescence couldn’t be farther from the brittle ennui of the earlier film.
Set in a small city in remote Guizhou province in the mid 1980s, One Summer With You sketches a poignant, tension-laden coming of- ge romance between young mailman Hongwei (Xu Tao) and his high school sweetheart Mingxin (Jiang Yan). After opening with two shocking flash-forwards, one depicting a wistful departure and horrific car crash; and the other a seemingly unprovoked attack on a teacher by student Jiang Yan, the film settles into a gentle, relaxed storytelling mode. We eventually discover that Hongwei’s crush on Mingxin provokes the attack on the teacher, after which he is expelled from high school and settles on being a postman on a bike. Meanwhile, Mingxin is going places. Not content to be stuck in a dead-end provincial town, and a top student in her school, Mingxin seems assured of being accepted by a major Beijing university. But Hongwei intercepts the letter of acceptance. While he holds it back, his patient, rather inarticulate courtship of Mingxin seems to pay off. She one day shows up with a thermos of soup for him in the middle of his rounds. Hongwei’s dilemma: hand over the key to her escape and future, or keep it secret, and keep Mingxin for himself?
The film follows their courtship through as series of sometimes virtually wordless, magically lyrical scenes: caught in a downpour with the mail, they hide under a small bridge and attempt to dry it so he can continue to work; riding together on his bicycle later, they seem alone in an ecstatic revery of young, innocent love; caught on either side of a train rushing through a passageway, they catch glimpses of each other, cinematically, as stopped framed images flashing between the undercarriage of the train that separates them. This feeling of a stirring of attraction, a yearning for connection, groping across a seemingly unbridgeable divide seems almost tangible.
Both main characters from damaged families, and in fact, the scars left on Hongwei by the loss of his mother, and on her by her abusive alcoholic father, who forces her mother to desert the family, seem to drive the two youngsters’ hunger for and difficulties with each other.
Xie Dong’s gently moving camera and patiently unhurried shots have the time and amplitude to set the two lovers in a richly detailed, authentically nuanced world. They hang out with another couple, their best friends Chubby and Xiaoqing: he is headed to the army, she to university. The scenes with the four of them dancing, singing, drinking, and swimming nicely capture that moment of suspended time at the end of high school, when adolescence, about to vanish into adulthood, seems capable of being prolonged indefinitely.
The film’s muted colours and superbly controlled cinematography by Yang Tao, an unusually subtle and musically rich score by Ding Wei, and fine performances by the athletic, powerfully charismatic Xu Tao (a rising star in 2006) and quietly elegant Jiang Yan all combine to give director Xie Dong’s vision a memorable power and texture.
One of a series of looks backwards to the mid 1980s, when China’s future seemed all potential, its socialist past not yet fully abandoned, its future as a frantically globalizing post-capitalist marketplace not yet embraced, One Summer With You captures both a country and a young couple in a an achingly evanescent moment, between the unlimited potential of youth and the harsh practicalities of adulthood.
Shelly Kraicer