So Long, My Son – Di jiu tian chang (2019)

Directed by: Xiaoshuai Wang | 185 minutes | drama | Actors: Liya Ai, Jiang Du, Zhao-Yan Guo-Zhang, Jingjing Li, Xi Qi, Jingchun Wang, Roy Wang, Cheng Xu, Mei Yong

In seemingly random jumps in time, incessantly back and forth over a period of thirty years, ‘So Long, My Son’ (2019) fragmentarily describes the course of a grieving process. Life isn’t easy for factory workers Yaojun Liu and Liyun Wang. As a result of the one-child policy in China, the couple is forced to terminate their second pregnancy early. As a result of the procedure, Liyun Wang becomes infertile. Their son drowns for a few years, leaving Yaojun Liu and Liyun Wang childless and broken.

This tragedy is set against the backdrop of a country that at one time finds itself in the twilight of a failed communist experiment, and at other times is already fully moving towards a capitalist society. Yaojun Liu and Liyun Wang in their grief isolate themselves from their friends and family, until they finally leave the community of their factory to the other side of the country where, like the millions of other migrant workers, they practically end up in another country. . Resignedly, Yaojun Liu observes: ‘Time has stopped for us, we are waiting for death.’ Only when, years later, they are reunited with their old friends from the factory, and it finally becomes possible for them to say goodbye to their son, thus closing the past, do they see how the world has changed around them.

‘So Long, My Son’ is a beautiful film that sometimes crackles and rumbles under its own weight. What a lot director Xiaoshuai Wang wants to tell and yet actually not. Typical of the chronological narrative form, he chooses to play with the key moments in the story by cutting them off prematurely and finishing them later. In this way, the viewer is kept on track until all the puzzle pieces finally fall into place. But just too often we are tossed back and forth between the different moments of time, so it takes a while before the story takes shape and we can really empathize with Yaojun Liu and Liyun Wang. And that while this film is strongest in the scenes in which Xiaoshuai Wang can leave it all to the actors.

Such as the scene in which Yaojun Liu and Liyun Wang, already graying, visit their child’s grave in a cemetery on the side of a highway. It is a simple stone, somewhat messy placed in dusty sand between a handful of other graves. They remove some withered grass and sweep away sand, they lay fruit on the grave and burn death money. In the next image we see that these graves are outside on the edge of a beautiful, modern cemetery.

More than the big story, the attention here is convincing for the small, beautiful and subtle play of the two protagonists, who make it tangible that there is a difference between human errors and inhuman injustice done by the state.