“Sunset is a love delayed” proclaim lyrics in a song heard at the start of To Love Again, and like so many lyrics, the pseudo-poetics are cringeworthily sentimental and yet have an emotional tug that can’t be summarily dismissed. Director-writer Gao Linyang’s subtle, carefully crafted feature debut about an older (but not elderly) couple facing the finiteness of life largely knows exactly how to avoid the pitfalls of such melodrama while being perceptive to their underlying truths, discreetly incorporating backstories and foregrounding the central relationship based on quotidian minutiae rather than talk. Incorporating political traumas of the past that continue to have a profound impact on China’s social fabric, the film movingly reveals their painful legacy on a deeply personal level, and although some background knowledge is helpful, its absence won’t hinder an appreciation for Gao’s empathetic treatment. Winner of one of Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition Special Jury Awards, To Love Again should be a favorite among festival audiences.
The film opens at the tail-end of a communal vow-renewal ceremony in Xi’an, with older couples dressed in Western wedding garb spiritedly entering the dressing room to change back into their regular clothes. After thirty years of marriage, Nie (Song Xiaoying) and Li (Li Xuejian) have an easy physicality and a well-worn daily life centered, as with many retired couples, around food. He’s begun thinking about future arrangements: he gets a call telling him to collect his first wife’s ashes, which are being dug up, so now he’s wondering aloud whether it’s possible to get a single cremation casket for himself, Nie and that first wife.
Nie’s not sure it’s such a good idea, proposing that perhaps her own ashes could be divvied up between her first husband’s and Li’s. Lately she’s also been thinking about mortality, driven by the terminal illness of her friend Meijuan (Liao Xueqiu), whose request that Nie find a good woman for her husband Ge (Bi Yanjun) once she’s gone is one of the film’s rare hackneyed notes. Ruminations on the past inevitably revive unprocessed memories which for Li are especially acute: in 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a reeducation camp. His first wife’s refusal to repudiate her husband led directly to her death that winter, creating a burden of guilt that draws him to travel alone northeast to his ancestral village.
The weight of the past, while heavy for them both in different ways, in no way taints the mutual affection between Nie and Li; neither one is given to discussing their feelings, but theirs is a comfortable, emotionally nourishing partnership, a true second love reinforced by the small, shared details of everyday life. Family is important, but his son lives in the States and her daughter (Liang Jing, also one of the producers) is a busy tour guide and single mom without a lot of time to spend with her mother and step-father. For this older couple, deciding where their remains will wind up means confronting deeply buried unspoken issues which shouldn’t rebound onto their tested relationship, but like the ashes themselves, it’s not so easy to compartmentalize.
Gao’s screenplay nimbly weaves these elements together, giving away just enough detail to fill in gaps without the need to over-explain. The script’s restraint is aided immeasurably by the assuredness of actors Song and Li, two veteran performers in their late 60s (so not exactly elderly) whose finely calibrated, detail-driven evocation of a couple shaken out of their projection of peace is a major contribution to the film’s success. Gao wisely relies on what they silently convey while building on the banality (and richness) of daily existence, from eating eggs to dealing with a broken refrigerator.
Cinematographer Shen Junyi’s rigorous compositions are an equal factor in the film’s emotional tenor, with almost every image anchored in some ways by a solid object, whether a door jamb bisecting the frame or a table taking up the bottom half of the foreground. It’s almost too much, but this separation and fragmentation acts as a concrete manifestation of a weight attached as well as the inescapable divide which Nie and Li will need to negotiate in order to find the “reunion again” that, in loose translation, is a rough rendering of the original Chinese title. The version viewed was before color grading and full sound mix was completed, but there were no noticeable technical problems.
Director: Gao Linyang
Screenplay: Gao Linyang
Cast: Li Xuejian, Song Xiaoying, Bi Yanjun, Liao Xueqiu, Liang Jing, Wang Xiaomu
Producer: Wang Donghui, Liang Jing
Co-producers: Zhu Wenjiu, Justine O.
Executive producer: Guan Hu
Cinematography: Shen Junyi
Production design: Shi Rongfeng
Editing: Tom Hsin-Ming Lin
Music: Wang Xiaomu
Sound: Zhao Suchen
Production company: The Seventh Art Pictures (China)
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Tiger Competition)
In Mandarin
88 minutes
