Two young boys play by the water. Soon, one is dead. This enigmatic tragedy is the core of a four-decade Chinese saga of grief, guilt and love, at once intimately personal and scarred by the state’s grinding turns. Director Wang Xiaoshuai shuffles time like a stacked deck’s cards, withholding vital facts, but keeping his camera on the lost boy’s parents, Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and Liyun (Yong Mei). Although years and memories crush them, they keep on.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution is recalled. But it’s the Eighties’ One Child Policy which haunts this story. Liyun and Yaojun are best friends with fellow factory-workers Haiyan (Ai Liya) and Yingming (Xu Cheng), with their respective sons Xingxing and Hao even born on the same day. But Haiyan uses her petty power in the Communist Party to force Liyun’s abortion of a second child. Then it’s Hao who is involved with Xingxing’s drowning.
As we gradually understand, this has sent Liyun and Yaojun tumbling away to the provincial town where we first encounter them, raising a resentful, adopted teenage substitute also named Xingxing. Youjun numbs and jolts himself with baijiu shots, and runs a repair shop out among the sleepy fishing nets. It’s a place to wash up. “We like it,” he says stoically. “We know no one...nothing. Not even their dialect.” And to Liyun: “Time stopped for us long ago. Now we’re just waiting to grow old.”
Wang has endured state re-education, and portrays lives where such punishment is one barely remarked fact among many. Hushed conversations as kettles boil dodge denunciation, and apartment dance parties mix joy with fear of execution. Hollow bureaucratic language remains constant with private enterprise’s arrival (“There’s no shame in redundancy, comrades...no more iron rice bowl!” – the latter a bitter boast after the millions Mao starved). Back in the city, Haiyan’s Party prominence morphs into entrepreneurial wealth, and pretty young Moli (Qi Xi, pictured above left) heads to the States, after a bittersweet hotel reunion with former mentor Youjun. Our ageing couple’s old apartment becomes a dusty relic amid thrusting high-rises, and hospitals gleam with prosperity they missed.
Yasujiro Ozu’s discarded parents in Tokyo Story (1953) come to mind. Youjun’s oaken worker’s strength shoulders the invisible burden of dead Xingxing and his miserable, delinquent substitute, and his uselessness as successive children are snatched away. Liyun believes he’s not bright, and his face is mostly a craggy mask. Softer beauty first pierces its suppressed pain and rage in Moli’s youthful company (she, seeming liberated, also suffers regret). Middle-aged Liyun meanwhile moves distractedly, as if something has been permanently misplaced. Though present and future mingle too, tiles on Xang’s smooth mosaic, the past weighs this couple down. Punk-haired teenagers, Xang’s more usual subject, mope in their modern path, no happier. Yet over time, Youjun and Liyun reach out to hold each other.
So Long, My Son’s three hours can be contemplatively still, in wide communal long-shots or lone close-ups, but never drag, thanks to black humour and copious drama. It’s a masterful social epic.