Jing is a deaf-mute teenager, in her mother’s custody after her parents’ divorce. She lives in a fishing village with her grandfather and uncle because she refuses to live with her mother and her lover, as she does not get on with him. Schoolwork does not interest her and she constantly stows away in her young uncle’s boat; he is the only person she feels totally comfortable with and the only one she feels truly loves her. The relationship between the two ends up going beyond the confines of commonly acceptable morality, and Jing is forced to go and live in the city with her father Zhang Haoyang. Employed in the local police precinct, Zhang is a chauvinist who doesn’t love his daughter and is obsessed by the desire to have a son. When his lover, Mei — a young, rebellious and independent musician — gets pregnant, she comes to live with Zhang and his daughter. The relationship between the two very different women — one who cannot hear and the other who makes a living from music — is transformed over time from one of hostility and reticence to one of understanding and solidarity. Zhang is under the illusion that he can create a new family, but dramatic events conspire to bring him right back down to earth, forcing him to examine himself as a man and father…
Based on a true story, it is set in Hunan, the province of the director’s birth; convincingly acted by non-professional actors who speak the local dialect, the film was in the making for two years.
The direction of an apparently simple story interwoven with complicated sentimental, existential and family matters, shows a singular maturity for a directorial debut. Indeed, from the very first shots, the film conveys a profound sensation of isolation and solitude; that of Jing, whose uncertain meandering along the railway line in search of an elusive something is accompanied discreetly by the camera, and Mei’s, the father’s young lover who is always rushing around, in fighting mood, as if life were a perennial battle. The lives of the two young women run on parallel lines and their existential loneliness is reflected in each other. The helplessness felt by Jing’s mother, oblivious to how she can help her daughter, is perceived acutely, as is the inability of her father to relate in a responsible and mature way to women. While the distance between ideals and reality in contemporary Chinese society seems to be almost exemplified by the innocence of the incestuous relationship between Jing and her uncle, and the more tormented one between Mei and motherhood. The castle of illusions that Jing’s father has built — and which is expertly represented in the scene in which the three main characters play at building a tower, which inevitable ends up collapsing — is no defence against the siege of reality. The poetry of the river scenes, suffused with blue light, where Jing and her fisherman uncle meet, gives way to the image of her outline and then that of her father: in two parallel scenes they find themselves alone by the river, watching the faraway city on the other side. And thus the film acquires subtle political significance.
Maria Barbieri