Song of Spring

妈妈！

China, 2022, colour, 1.85:1, 108 mins.

Director: Yang Li’na 杨荔钠.

Rating: 5/10.

Mother-daughter Alzheimer’s drama has an interesting setup, strong leads but no sense of dramatic development.

STORY

Hangzhou city, Zhejiang province, eastern China, 20 Sep 2014. Sixty-five-year-old Feng Jizhen (Xi Meijuan), a retired university teacher, takes her mother Jiang Yuzhi (Wu Yanshu), 84, a former liberal-arts teacher, for a hospital checkup. Her health is found to be good. Jiang Yuzhi is widowed and Feng Jizhen unmarried; the two women live together in a brittle relationship, exacerbated by the daughter’s obsessive neatness, which gets on the mother’s nerves. As well as doing volunteer work at an old people’s home, and sweeping the streets, Feng Jizhen spends her time editing a book on her late father, Feng Bingtang (Ren Luomin), a renowned archaeologist. One day, on a bus, Feng Jizhen is falsely accused of pickpocketing by a busybody passenger (Dong Jingchuan), even though she knows the real culprit was a punk girl (Wen Qi) she saw in the bus. That night the house that she lives in with her mother is broken into and some personal valuables taken. Following a series of dizzy spells, Feng Jizhen sees a doctor friend, Liang Chengyuan (Zhu Shimao), and is diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t tell her mother, but quietly transfers her savings account over to her and also takes out an insurance policy, preparing for the time when she’ll be incapable of tacking care of herself. The police bring round the punk girl who’s been arrested for robberies in the neighbourhood. Feng Jizhen then puts her mother in an old people’s home for three months so she can finish in peace her work on the book about her father; she also starts putting post-it notes around the house. One day, however, Jiang Yuzhi suddenly comes back, on the flimsy excuse that she couldn’t sleep at the old people’s home. It’s then that Feng Jizhen tells her she’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and what this will mean for her in the future. Jiang Yuzhi, however, takes the news as a challenge, throws herself into exercising, and more and more starts looking after her daughter, their roles now reversed.

REVIEW

Two veteran Mainland actresses – China’s favourite grandma figure Wu Yanshu 吴彦姝 and versatile character actress Xi Meijuan 奚美娟 – show fine chemistry together as mother and daughter but are let down by a pedestrian script in Alzheimer’s drama Song of Spring 妈妈！, the third fiction feature by onetime documentarian Yang Li’na 杨荔钠 that supposedly completes her loose trilogy on female feelings. Way better than Longing for the Rain 春梦 (2013), her ludicrously over-egged debut on repressed female desire, it’s about on a par with her mother-daughter-granddaughter drama Spring Tide 春潮 (2019), a potentially powerful movie about three women in a cramped flat that was also holed by a woolly, unbalanced screenplay. Yang’s script for Song of Spring shows glimmerings that she’s starting to understand dramatic development but, after an interesting first 20 minutes, the film largely falls back on cataloguing the daughter’s slow decline into dementia, capped by some soppy sentiment that justifies the film’s Chinese title (literally, “Mummy!”). Despite that, it managed to take some RMB77 million on release last autumn, a respectable amount given its specialised appeal.

The opening scenes set up the edgy relationship between the two women, aged 60-something and 80-something, who just about manage to live in the same house together and are tied together by the memories of their late father/husband, a renowned archaeologist who died many years earlier. The daughter is unmarried, obsessively neat, heavily into volunteer work, and working on a biography of her dad inbetween looking after her grouchy mum. You could scrape the passive female aggressiveness off the walls. But when the daughter is unexpectedly diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s, everything is reversed, with the mother ending up looking after the daughter.

It’s a nice idea that’s teasingly set up but largely left hanging thereafter. Yang, again credited as sole writer, doesn’t seem to know how to develop the material, and falls back on documentation rather than dramatisation. Guangzhou-born Wu, 84, is the film’s quiet motor who comes into her own during the second half; Shanghai-born Xi, 67, largely seen in supporting roles, is equally good as the seemingly indestructible fusspot who suddenly needs her mother’s help. As in Spring Tide, other characters come and go, including a punk teenage thief (Taiwan actress Wen Qi 文淇, 19, Angels Wear White 嘉年华, 2017) and a friendly doctor (actor/director Zhu Shimao 朱时茂, Love Retake 爱情不NG, 2013); but their characters, and especially the girl’s, are never developed in any meaningful way. The final 40 minutes are a long hawl to an unsurprising ending.

The largely handheld photography by Taiwan d.p. Yu Jingping 余静萍 is naturalistic and focused on the characters, with none of the texture or depth of colour as some of her previous work (Zinnia Flower 百日告别, 2015; SoulMate 七月与安生, 2016; Better Days 少年的你, 2019). The gentle, piano-dominated score by Sweden-born, China-raised, US-based Shen Bi’ang 沈必昂 [Björn Shen] (black crime comedy Be Somebody 扬名立万, 2021) is conventionally warm. Editing by the experienced Zhu Lin 朱琳 is smooth. The film was shot in autumn 2021.

CREDITS

Presented by Zhejiang Hengdian Film (CN), Tianjin Lian Ray Pictures (CN), Tianjin Zuoyi Pictures (CN), China Film (CN), Beijing Weimeng Internet Technology (CN), Lian Ray (Shanghai) Pictures (CN).

Script: Yang Li’na. Photography: Yu Jingping. Editing: Zhu Lin, Zhang Chong. Music: Shen Bi’ang [Björn Shen]. Art direction: Zhai Tao. Styling: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: Liu Xiaosha, Wang Gang. Executive direction: Zhang Zhengquan.

Cast: Wu Yanshu (Jiang Yuzhi), Xi Meijuan (Feng Jizhen), Wen Qi (Zhou Xia), Zhu Shimao (Liang Chengyuan, doctor), Li Xiaochuan (policeman), Liu Yang (drunk man), Feng Jiamei (young Jiang Yuzhi), Ren Luomin (Feng Bingtang, Feng Jizhen’s father), Dong Jingchuan (troublesome busybody), Yang Enyou (young girl tourist), Liang Yongqi (bad youth), Xu Yixuan (young Feng Jizhen), Yin Xiuzhen (Tang Wanru).

Premiere: Beijing Film Festival (competition), 19 Aug 2022.

Release: China, 10 Sep 2022.