Tracing Her Shadow

又见奈良

China/Japan, 2020, colour, 1.85:1, 98 mins.

Director: Pengfei 鹏飞 [Song Pengfei 宋鹏飞].

Rating: 5/10.

Shallow, anecdotal yarn about an old Chinese woman searching for her foster-daughter in Japan.

STORY

Nara, near Osaka, Japan, autumn 2005. Chen Huiming (Wu Yanshu), an elderly woman in her mid-70s, arrives by plane from northeast China and stays with Shimizu Hatsumi (Ying Ze), 26, a bilingual half-Chinese woman who was raised in China and whose Japanese father, Shimizu Chokichi, was an old friend of hers. Chen Huiming has come to find Chen Lihua, one of many children left behind in northeast China when Japanese settlers fled the region in 1945 at the end of WW2. Chen Huiming had fostered her and in 1994, at the age of about 50, Chen Lihua had gone to Nara to try to find her birth parents, who were originally from there. She had kept in touch by letter with Chen Huiming; but not having heard from her for the past five years, Chen Huiming has come to track her down. Shimizu Hatsumi takes Chen Huiming for dinner to the bar where she used to work, and they are joined by Yoshizawa Kazuo (Kunimura Jun), a retired policeman who’s a regular there. After hearing Chen Huiming’s story, he offers to help. While Chen Huiming is alone in the flat, Shimizu Hatsumi’s ex-boyfriend (Akiyama Shintaro) comes to collect some things; their relationship had broken up partly because his parents wouldn’t allow him to marry her. Shimizu Hatsumi and Chen Huiming track down Yamada Tetsuo (Zhang Wenxi/Uemura Fumiyoshi), head of the Repatriated Orphans’ Union, who works in a scrapyard; he, too, is a war orphan, and still speaks better Chinese than Japanese, but Chen Lihua’s case rings no bells. Yoshizawa Kazuo rings to say he remembers seeing Chen Lihua a couple of years ago; he takes the two women to meet a former police colleague, Takakura Akira (Gozu Takeo), who despite being completely drunk at a sake festival manages to call another colleague and get Chen Lihua’s address. There, however, the flat’s owner, a tofu seller (Umemoto Hiromi), says she left years ago. The search for Chen Lihua is constantly hampered by the fact that Chen Huiming doesn’t know her Japanese name. However, they finally find the location of a watercolour Chen Lihua painted, in some temple grounds, and speak to the gardener, Takeshita (Nagase Masatoshi), who steers them in a further direction. And then, on the way back from visiting a war-orphan family in the mountains, Yoshizawa Kazuo gets a phone call from Takakura Akira.

REVIEW

Quiet, minimalist playing by veteran actress Wu Yanshu 吴彦姝, the busiest octagenarian in the business (Book of Love 北京遇上西雅图之不二情书, 2016; Love Education 相爱相亲, 2017; A Hustle Bustle New Year 没有过不去的年, 2021), seems to give much more weight to Tracing Her Shadow 又见奈良 than it actually has. The warning signs are there in the opening credits, which list Japan’s Kawase Naomi 河濑直美 and the Mainland’s Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 as creative producers, as well as a director, Beijing-born Pengfei 鹏飞, aka Song Pengfei 宋鹏飞, who’s so far made two bloodless, pretentious films (Underground Fragrance 地下•香, 2015, aka Beijing Stories; Left Behind Buddha 米花之味, 2017, aka The Taste of Rice Flower) that touched on interesting topics – migrant workers, the Dai minority in Yunnan province, left-behind children – but sucked the life out of them. Tracing is not nearly as hard a sit as the credits augur, and does make an honest stab at its subject of “war orphans” left behind (and raised by Chinese) in northeast China when Japanese settlers beat a hasty retreat at the end of WW2. But the film still lacks any emotional or intellectual depth, and also sidesteps taking any position, in favour of nice visuals and a series of cute vignettes. After premiering at the Shanghai festival last summer, it opened in the Mainland this spring to box office of RMB5 million, respectable for such specialised fare.

The film is set in rural Nara prefecture, close to Osaka, in the south of Japan’s main island, Honshu, and has Kawase’s fingerprints all over it. Not only was she born there but also her parents split up when she young and she was raised by a great-aunt, so the film’s main theme of searching for one’s parental roots clearly holds a special interest, even though she’s explored this theme in some of her own works. (The film is also co-financed and co-produced by Nara’s biennial film festival, which Kawase helped found in 2010.) So, though Song takes solo credit for the script, he’s clearly sailing in friendly waters.

Set in autumn 2005, the basic plot has the aged Chen Huiming (Wu) flying in from northeast China to track down the left-behind orphan she raised after WW2 and who finally left for Nara in 1994, at the age of about 50, to find her birth parents. Raised as a Chinese, under the name Chen Lihua, she’d initially kept in touch with Chen Huiming via letters; but now, after a silence of five years, Chen Huiming has come herself to find out what has happened to Chen Lihua. Chen Huiming stays with the half-Chinese daughter of an old friend of hers who was also a war orphan in the northeast, and the two women, helped by a retired policeman who welcomes the distraction, follow one after another clue to Chen Lihua’s whereabouts, hampered the whole time by not knowing what Japanese name she’s adopted.

Like Song’s two other films, Tracing skips lightly around the various issues raised – cultural identity, blood vs water, a sense of home, a whole hidden generation – without ever going very deep, and the ending is frustratingly inconclusive in a very arty way. Song’s regular actress, the striking Beijing-born, Hong Kong-raised Ying Ze 英泽, convincingly plays the old lady’s host with a slight sense of bi-cultural unease, more relaxed speaking (and eating) Chinese than Japanese, while veteran Japanese actor Kunimura Jun 国村隼, 65, is a nice dramatic counterweight with his meticulous portrayal of the retired policeman. Between them, and philosophically surveying the types they encounter en route, Wu grounds the whole shaggy-dog story with a calmness that seems ready to accept any outcome.

As on Buddha, Taiwan’s Liao Benrong 廖本榕, longtime d.p. for Malaysian Chinese director Cai Mingliang 蔡明亮, is the other star of the movie with his delicate Nara landscapes and warm interiors. Similarly, editing by Taiwan’s Chen Bowen 陈博文 and Weng Yuhong 翁玉鸿 is again smooth and unforced. But all that can’t disguise the film’s flimsiness and lack of depth, which would have been less obvious at 60 rather than 90 minutes. As it ambles along from one pleasant vignette to another, there’s simply no sense of development in the material.

The film was shot in Nov 2019. The Chinese title means “Seeing Nara Again”. A child-like cartoon sequence at the beginning, to explain the history of war orphans, sets completely the wrong tone. End credits are Japanese-style, with no castlist identifying who played who.

CREDITS

Presented by Fujian Hengye Pictures (CN), Nara International Film Festival (JP), X Stream Pictures (Beijing) (CN). Produced by Beijing Hengye Herdsman Pictures (CN), Nara International Film Festival (JP), X Stream Pictures (Beijing) (CN), 21 Incorporation (JP).

Script: Pengfei [Song Pengfei]. Photography: Liao Benrong. Editing: Chen Bowen, Weng Yuhong. Music: Suzuki Keiichi. Art direction: Iwakawa Setsuko. Sound: Zhang Nan, Mori Eiji.

Cast: Wu Yanshu (Chen Huiming), Ying Ze (Shimizu Hatsumi/Xiaoze), Kunimura Jun (Yoshizawa Kazuo), Nagase Masatoshi (Takeshita, temple gardener), Akiyama Shintaro (Shimizu Hatsumi’s ex-boyfriend), Zhang Wei (Shimizu Hatsumi’s boss), Suzuki Keiichi (old man in flat), Gozu Takeo (Takakura Akira), Zhang Hongmei/Yoshinaga Miwa (Zhang Shuzhi, wife singing Bejing Opera), Zhang Wenxi/Uemura Fumiyoshi (Yamada Tetsuo), Umemoto Hiromi (tofu seller), Pengfei [Song Pengfei] (butcher), Tanaka Ryu.

Premiere: Shanghai Film Festival (Competition), 31 Jul 2020.

Release: China, 19 Mar 2021; Japan, tba.