There is the whiff of the film noir in Some Rain Must Fall (Kon fang jian li de nv ren), an impressively atmospheric feature debut from Qiu Yang, whose short A Gentle Night won the best short film award at Cannes in 2017.
Set in an anonymous city in mainland China, its shards of a story tell of a woman whose marriage is disintegrating and who appears to be heading for a nervous breakdown. Aimed at festival and China-phile consumption, it is the kind of sophisticated, understated film that wins prizes and shows a strong talent in the making, but will be a harder sell for wider audiences.
A point of connection with Western viewers is the film’s haunting visual style marked by rainy, soft-focus empty streets and bits of colored neon flashing in the night. Its typical thriller tropes may relate to the fact it was shot by young award-winning German cinematographer Constanze Schmitt. The film is an international coprod between Singapore, France, the UK, the U.S. and China.
At the center of the story is what the Chinese call a “moderately rich” family who are able to afford nice clothes, a tastefully decorated home, two cars in their building’s parking garage and, in the future, sending their daughter abroad to study. The hitch is that they seem as dissatisfied as any Western family where money is constantly an issue and divorce is in the air.
The story begins one evening at a high school gym where a tired, preoccupied Mrs. Cai (Yu Aier) has come to pick up her daughter Lin (Di Shike). When some rude boys demand she throw their basketball back, and she accidentally hits an elderly woman, knocking her unconscious. Like so much else in the film, especially the important things, the accident takes place just off-screen where we can’t see it but have to imagine what it looks like. As a narrative strategy it keeps the audience actively engaged in co-creating the story, while elements of Cai’s life seem to happen in a slightly unreal dream whose credibility is always a little shaky.
For instance, the seriousness of the accident remains in doubt for most of the film. Although the dazed housewife is fingered as responsible and interviewed by the police (off-screen), the accident turns out to be mostly a sort of co-symptom among many that her life is unraveling under bad stars. Other worries are created by Lin, who wants to leave the sports team, apparently a move viewed as a minor scandal in school circles and one that could lose her points somehow and jeopardize her graduation and studies abroad. The girl seems maddeningly indifferent to both school and her parents.
While the injured old lady hovers uncertainly in the hospital, her family demands monetary compensation and her scary-looking grandson makes some nasty gestures against Cai’s family. But even this thread of violence soon peters out, as the focus narrows on Cai.
Actress Yu Aier is effective but a little scary herself in the main role. Wearing the same fashionable sweater and tacky hairclip every day and in every scene, sporting an angry, dejected silence on her face, she seems to slip deeper and deeper into her own world of depression and fantasy. She acts as coldly and unpleasantly as possible to her husband Ding (Wei Yibo), a forced workaholic in a business suit who has little time for family life and even less time to try and understand his wife’s problems. Knowing their separation is imminent, Cai makes anonymous phone calls to her former lover. She barges in on him one night in a particularly hair-raising scene where she seems to have gone off the edge into madness. Then she is back in her car again, driving.
Only when Cai drives Lin to a poor village outside the city to see her dying grandfather do we finally begin to understand where she is coming from. It is not just her newly conquered affluence that is alienating her, but the toxic family environment which hides a dark secret in her past.
Her wobbly mental state is expressively reflected in the eerie sound design and in Schmitt’s shadowy, washed-out cinematography, whose elegantly framed shots appear emptied of meaning, since everything important is taking place somewhere else.
Director, screenwriter: Qiu Yang
Producers: Jeremy Chua, Mike Goodridge, Alex C. Lo, Mélissa Malinbaum, Lin Fan, Darcy Xi Wang
Cast: Yu Aier, Di Shike, Wei Yibo, Xu Tianyi, Gu Tingxiu
Cinematography: Constanze Schmitt
Production design: Shan Yinghao
Costume design: Zhang Yadi
Editing: Carlo Francisco Manatad, Julien Lacheray
Sound: Mei Zhu, Romain Ozanne, Emmanuel Croset
Production companies: Wild Grass Films (Singapore), Why Not Productions (France), Good Chaos (UK), Cinema Inutile (U.S.) La Fonte (China), Aurua Yangshuo (China), XS Media (China)
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Encounters)
In Wu, Mandarin
98 minutes