Gone with the Boat
乘船而去
China, 2023, colour, 1.85:1, 98 mins.
Director: Chen Xiaoyu 陈小雨.
Rating: 5/10.
Family portrait centred on the wife’s dying mother is well played but bumpily written and emotionally uninvolving.
STORY
A riverside village, Zhejiang province, eastern China, Jun 2019. The widowed Zhou Jin (Ge Zhaomei), 72, lives alone, occasionally doing work as a professional mourner. One evening, on a rare visit, her daughter Su Nianzhen (Liu Dan) arrives for dinner from Shanghai with her American husband Ryan (Brent Haas) and teenage daughter Su Can (Liu Fenghuan). Su Nianzhen is in an irritable mood and they don’t stay long. The whole family is fractured: Zhou Jin’s son, Su Nianqing (Wu Zhoukai), is a drifter and rarely visits her, and Su Nianzhen’s teenage son, Song Yuantao (He Zhenyu), left school against her wishes to work as a film extra and is no longer in contact with her. One day Su Nianzhen and her brother learn that Zhou Jin has a terminal brain tumour, for which surgery is not an option. Both visit her regularly in hospital in Shanghai and look after her. Meanwhile, Su Nianzhen is plagued by business problems, including a private school for English that she and Ryan set up but which is losing money. Ryan urges her to sell out to an interested buyer but she stubbornly refuses. Zhou Jin comes to stay at their flat but the atmosphere there is uneasy. Ryan and Su Can visit family in the US, leaving Su Nianzhen alone to care for her mother, who, despite her daughter’s objections, insists on checking herself out of the hospital as she considers her treatment to be a pointless waste of money. She moves back to her village, accompanied by Su Nianqing, who is unmarried and has no responsibilities. Zhou Jin tries to fit him up with a young local woman, Fang Rong (An Ning), but without success. Su Nianzhen joins them later as Zhou Jin’s health declines. Zhou Jin calmly arranges all her finances for when she’s dead. But in the present Su Nianzhen and her family are running out of money as Zhou Jin becomes more and more bed-ridden.
REVIEW
Zhejiang-born film-maker Chen Xiaoyu 陈小雨, 29, makes a low-key feature debut with Gone with the Boat 乘船而去, a family portrait centred on the wife’s dying mother that’s nicely played and technically well mounted but suffers from a total lack of emotionally involving drama. Almost a year after premiering at the Shanghai festival, it was released to a box office of RMB1.6 million, slim even by arthouse standards.
Chen (real name: Chen Yu 陈宇) graduated from the Toronto Film School and since 2011 has made some eight independent documentaries and shorts, including the hour-long Young Wallet 年轻的钱包 (2012) and Dubai-set, feature-length The Waves 浪 (2014), which have an offbeat, slightly funky flavour that’s very different from that of the fictional Gone with the Boat. Chen wrote, edited and directed the picture, so it presumably accords with what he intended, and the opening section does raise expectations of a complex family drama.
Zhou Jin, 72, is a widow who lives a modest life alone in a riverside village, occasionally doing work as a professional mourner. One evening she gets a rare visit from her daughter Su Nianzhen, American son-in-law and teenage grand-daughter, who drive down for dinner but don’t stay any longer than they have to. The daughter is ratty and preoccupied by business problems back in Shanghai; the audience later learns that her elder teen son has left school (and home) to work as a film extra and won’t even take his mother’s calls. Despite the underlying family tensions, Zhou Jin is welcoming, unflappable and generous to a fault.
Fifteen minutes into the film it’s suddenly sprung on the audience that Zhou Jin has been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour – which brings her first to Shanghai for hospital treatment and then back to her village for her final months. The process of caring for her helps to heal some family wounds and brings Su Nianzhen and her younger drifter brother, Su Nianqing, closer together. That’s it.
There’s obviously a moving, if not very original, story to be told here, but Chen’s screenplay is bumpily developed, especially in its first third, with information passed to the audience in a disorganised way. Combined with the absence of any dramatic tension, the result is difficult to become involved with: Zhou Jin’s gradual demise just seems a medical inevitability to be observed in a clinical way. This is underlined by the limited use of music and by having the camera of d.p. Huang Yichuan 黄一川 (who always delivers well-composed, clean images) often at a distance from the actors.
All that is a pity, as the performances are generally good, especially by theatre and TV actress Ge Zhaomei 葛兆美 (the tolerant mother-in-law in The Mahjong Box 三缺一, 2016) as the calmly determined widow, experienced TV and stage actress Liu Dan 刘丹 (so good as the odious mum in All These Years 这么多年, 2023) as the ratty daughter, and theatre performer Wu Zhoukai 吴洲凯, 36, as her laid-back drifter brother. The film’s Chinese title means “Go(ing) by Boat”, a reference to the importance of the craft in the villagers’ lives (a theme that is never really developed).
CREDITS
Presented by Zhejiang Fractal Star Film Production (CN), Chongqing Infinina Media (CN).
Script: Chen Xiaoyu. Photography: Huang Yichuan. Editing: Chen Xiaoyu. Music: Sheng Yu. Art direction: Deng Xiaozhen. Costumes: Guo Jiayu. Sound: Lei Zailiang, Zhang Yin.
Cast: Ge Zhaomei (Zhou Jin), Liu Dan (Su Nianzhen, daughter), Wu Zhoukai (Su Nianqing, son), Brent Haas (Ryan, son-in-law), He Zhenyu (Song Yuantao, grandson), Liu Fenghuan (Su Can/Susan, granddaughter), Wang Zhikang (Zhou Wang), Zhou Lin (Xu Lu), Guo Yamei (auntie), Du Xian (Ling, Su Nianqing’s classmate), An Ning (Fang Rong), Tie Zhenzhu (voice of Fang Rong), Ying Changhua (Changhua), Ju Jingye (Liu, doctor), Ju Jiazheng (voice of Liu), Zhu Qingguo (duty doctor).
Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival (Asian New Talent), 12 Jun 2023.
Release: China, 12 Apr 2024.