Waiting for Me in Heaven

在天堂等我

China, 2018, colour, 2.35:1, 129 mins.

Director: Wang Jun 王军.

Rating: 7/10.

Modest but strikingly constructed love story pivoted on the horrific 1976 Tangshan earthquake.

STORY

Kailuan mining area, Tangshan city, Hebei province, northern China, east of Beijing, summer 1974. After a while away, country boy Wang Xiaotu (Li Bin) returns home and stays in town with his old friend, chubby Li Jianjun (Fei Long), PE teacher at the local primary school. Wang Xiaotu has already spotted there’s an attractive new teacher at the school, Ou Hailian (Yu Feifei), and one day she catches him in the teachers’ office looking at her things. She’s intrigued by the sunny Wang Xiaotu, though her father, headmaster Ou Huayang (Li Mengnan), disapproves. To her amusement, Wang Xiaotu repeatedly courts her in the street, until she tells him to stop. Despite that, he carries on attracting her attention, even stealing a chicken from the hard-up mother (Na Renhua) of one of her pupils, Xiaopangzi (Luo Zanxi) – a stunt that goes embarrassingly wrong. Eventually he takes her on a walk to his home village, Shitou Cun, where he was raised by his grandmother (Wei Qing). Due to some bad weather, she ends up staying the night there. Next day, her angry father takes Wang Xiaotu to the police, where he’s charged with stealing the chicken as well as her father’s watch. The watch that Wang Xiaotu is wearing is actually his own father’s, given him by his grandmother; but he pleads guilty to the false charge, so as not to blacken Ou Hailian’s name anymore, and is sentenced to corrective labour in a prison camp. Ou Hailian is furious with her father and says she wants to be with Wang Xiaotu when he’s released. Two years later, in Jul 1976, Wang Xiaotu returns and meets his elder brother, Wang Shengli (Mao Hai), who knows he was unfairly imprisoned. Too shy to visit Ou Hailian, Wang Xiaotu stays with Li Jianjun; but she catches the two men drinking together and says she promised Wang Xiaotu’s late grandmother that she would look after him. She insists on him biking her to her home in public, so everyone will know they’re a couple; and at home she faces down her father, announcing she and Wang Xiaotu are to marry. That night she and her father argue, he slaps her, and she cuts her leg on some broken glass. Her father and Li Jianjun rush her to hospital, where she’s given a bed. Then, in the early morning, just before 04:00 on 28 Jul, the Tangshan earthquake strikes.

REVIEW

A love story pivoted on the horrific 1976 Tangshan earthquake, Waiting for Me in Heaven 在天堂等我 blends a retro simplicity with a powerful take on the disaster itself that makes a virtue of the film’s modest budget. The sixth feature by writer-director Wang Jun 王军, 47 – who debuted with the WW2-set drama In That Autumn 那年秋天 (2006) but didn’t return to the big screen until the children’s film Nuomi’s Apple 糯米的苹果 (2016) – it’s a surprise discovery from a little-known name, himself a Tangshan native who survived the disaster as a young boy. Nicely played by a small key cast, and very moving in its strikingly mounted second half, Waiting made no impression at the Mainland box office (RMB500,000) but deserves considerable respect, showing how life (and everything one takes for granted) can be overturned in a few seconds but feelings can survive for ever.

Where the big-budget Aftershock 唐山大地震 (2010) got the actual earthquake out of the way early on and then concentrated on some of the survivors, Waiting is more the other way round, with the viewer getting to know the protagonists very well before tragedy strikes. Easily sustaining its long running time of 129 minutes (only a few shy of Aftershock‘s), the film has time to breathe in developing its characters, especially during the first half, a 74-minute section centred on the romance between a mouthy young guy and a young schoolteacher, before the crunch second half, a 50-or-so-minute section immediately after the quake. The carefully de-politicised setting, during the final years of the Cultural Revolution – now often wistfully portrayed as a simpler, nobler era (“when boys whistled and girls blushed”, as an opening title says) – is supported by Wang’s clean, unfussy direction, warm summery colours by regular d.p. Zhu Haisu 朱海粟, clean art direction by Bai Hao 白昊 (Feng Shui 万箭穿心, 2012; Fall of Ming 大明劫, 2013) and the central performances.

Top-billed Li Bin 李滨, 36, whose credits stretch back to playing one of the leads in Beijing Bicycle 十七岁的单车 (2001), has the right looks and demeanour for a sunny, impulsive youth of the period without overdoing things, and he’s well paired with newer actress Yu Feifei 于非非, whose entire career so far has been in films by Wang and who previously acted alongside Li in the drama Promise 应承 (2016). Where Li draws an uncomplicated character, Yu’s schoolteacher is quieter but more knowing, finally deciding to throw in her lot with the impulsive youth and not bending after he’s unjustly sentenced to corrective labour. It’s she – in one of the film’s best scenes – who insists on publicly riding through town with him after he’s released, and she who stands up against her vindictive father.

Between the two float the other characters: the man’s best pal, ingenuously played by professional fattie Fei Long 肥龙; the teacher’s conservative father, underplayed by Li Mengnan 李梦男 (Ma Wen’s Battle 马文的战争, 2010); and Mao Hai 毛孩 (Someone to Talk To 一句顶一万句, 2016), looking rather stiff in period specs and a constrained role, as the lead’s elder brother. In a supporting role as a single mother, veteran Na Renhua 娜仁花 pops to good effect.

But it’s in the film’s bold second half in which the earlier work of the four leads (Li, Yu, Mao, Fei Long) gradually pays off. Without spoiling the surprise, it’s this section – announced by a shock image, and shot in grey tones, almost entirely in close-up – that earns Waiting its laurels, an artistic decision that’s in line with the film’s economy and simplicity as well as working in its own right. The hitherto warm score, supervised by Xiaozhuang 小壮, is sometimes over-cooked here but is generally right for what is in essence a love story, not a disaster movie.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Chuanyi Shengshi TV Media (CN).

Script: Wang Jun, Wang Jinsong. Photography: Zhu Haisu. Editing: Cheng Xingxing, Zhu Pengna. Music: Xiaozhuang, Wang Dafu, Zhao Fan. Art direction: Bai Hao. Costume design: Song Jianjuan. Sound: Hu Zhenhai, Lv Peng. Executive direction: Che Qiang, Wang Jinsong.

Cast: Li Bin (Wang Xiaotu), Yu Feifei (Ou Hailian), Mao Hai (Wang Shengli, Wang Xiaotu’s older brother), Li Mengnan (Ou Huayang, Ou Hailian’s father), Fei Long (Li Jianjun), Liu Wei (old Wang Xiaotu), Wei Qing (Wang Xiaotu’s grandmother), Luo Zanxi (Xiaopangzi, young boy), Na Renhua (Xiaopangzi’s mother), Peng Yu (Liu, old ice-lolly seller), Ma Dehua (caretaker guard), Zhao Qian (woman chasing chicken), Zhang Hongjie (her husband), Hou Xiuqing (Auntie Hou, Wang Shengli’s housekeeper), Ji Mei (Wang Hui, Wang Shengli’s wife), Mu Jianrong (platoon leader), Bo Chen (young fighter), Liu Zhen (Daguan’er, retarded man), Li Xiaolei (police station head), Miao Miao (woman in earthquake), Zhao Chenyang (duty policeman), Liu Yafei (duty policewoman).

Release: China, 30 Nov 2018.