So Long, My Son at Sydney Film Festival
A child sits with a Mickey Mouse backpack beside him, watching the waves roll onto shore and looking out towards the distant horizon, the camera hand-held and shaky. Unable to see him clearly we stand behind, keeping our distance but eagerly wishing to connect with him and to see his face.
The next scene is a familiar one, a family gathered together for meal, the father offering his growing child an extra portion of food as a sign of love and care. The simplicity of this scene echoes an afterthought many of us may have in hindsight as time passes by, as children do we ever think about how much our parents love us and the sacrifices they’ve had to make and as parents how long are we able keep our children connected to us, to their past?
In the midst of cultural change within China from the 1980s to the present day, Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son is a film which portrays the ever-growing distance felt within a family whose contrasting views and ideologies have grown from experience, each individually formed and vastly different.
After an unfortunate event resulting in the loss of their son, Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and Liyun (Mei Yong) adopt another, Liu Xing (Roy Wang), as a way of filling the emptiness they feel after their loss caring for Xing despite their financial limitations. Liu Xing, or Xing Xing as he is called in the film, does not feel the same way, ‘I hate this place. I hate them.’
Simply unable to see the joy it is to be adopted by a loving family, Xing’s adoption is not one met with gratefulness but with frustration, rejecting his parents and slowly becoming more and more distant as time passes by. As the only child of the family Xing Xing feels the pressure of parental expectation, to make a better life for his parents who live in poverty and Yaojun and Liyun both feel pressured to provide for their son as best they can. Piecing together fragments of their past and interweaving them with hope for their future, their family is one born out of choice rather than blood, the choice to love and respect or the choice to separate.
Wang’s So Long, My Son weaves together a story that exists beyond its Chinese borders, alluding to the distance, both physical and emotional, created between parents and children, that feels strangely familiar. Just like water which ebbs and flows, over time the children of immigrant parents drift away from their roots exchanging their origin in order to settle in amongst their new country.
Often the characters are placed in silhouette, cast in shadow or obstructed by an object, the audience unable to see them clearly, perhaps a metaphor for the uncertainty of their future. Upon reflection it always seems clearer when you look back on things belonging to past and when you look to things of the future the uncertainty is fear-inducing simply because you don’t know what it brings.
Throughout, Wang Xiaoshuai uses songs such as Auld Lang Syne and Rivers of Babylon to represent better times. Auld Lang Syne is about love and friendship and Rivers of Babylon’s lyrics speak of weeping and remembering ‘Zion’ which is another word for heaven or restoration, both songs longing for better times and for what once was.
Throughout So Long, My Son, the small, seemingly insignificant interactions between groups feel familiar to me, the quiet mundane exchanges of people gathered to converse over tea, the politeness of asking if one has eaten, the hot water flask placed on a table with a piece of perspex atop to prevent the plastic tablecloth below from melting, the white singlet the father wears, and the cooking of meals in a wok. It is perhaps the shared cultural experience that makes it a little difficult for me to watch, Wang paints a realistic picture that helps audiences understand and empathise with the struggles parents Yaojun and Liyun go through, the efforts of loving someone made almost in vain.
Just like Xing Xing, it’s hard to tell without hindsight what our parents have had to go through until we look back on how things used to be. His eventual return home is separated by distance, shown by the placement of a glass window or a curtain in the foreground to obstruct the frame, the use of long distance phone call, both representing the longing for both parties to reconnect but the reality of distance and time having separated them.
Just like the film, which opens with a frame observing a child sitting near a reservoir, we are unable to clearly see his face with his back towards us, uncertain and unknowing of the narrative about to unfold. As an audience we too are like the parents in So Long, My Son, we watch from afar, we love by eventually letting go, wishing those we love to go before us to better themselves, our lives set in the past with the hope that theirs will lead to a better and brighter future.
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For more details about Sydney Film Festival, go here: https://www.sff.org.au
Review by Addy Fong.
