A Dog Barking at the Moon

再见，南屏晚钟

China/Spain, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 108 mins.

Director: Xiang Zi 相梓.

Rating: 5/10.

Good-looking, ambitiously structured family drama is more a clever exercise than an involving experience.

STORY

China, the present day. Huang Xiaoyu (Nan Ji) gives birth to a child in a hospital. (A couple of decades ago, at university, Huang Xiaoyu’s mother, Li Jiumei [Jiang Bing], had shared a room with fellow student Liu Yuanyuan [Ming Xing]. Li Jiumei had a boyfriend, Huang Tao.) Some three months before the birth of her child, Huang Xiaoyu flies in from the US with her husband Benjamin (Thomas Fiquet) and the couple stay with her parents, Huang Tao (Wu Renyuan) and Li Jiumei (Na Renhua). Huang Tao is uncommunicative and leaves Li Jiumei, who is nervous and chattery, to talk to the couple over their dinner. Privately, both parents cannot understand why their daughter married a foreigner. (When Huang Xiaoyu was a teenager [Zhang Xinyue], her mother had found her father making love to a young man, Feng Xi, in their home and gone berserk. Later, Huang Tao had insisted that, if they got a divorce, their daughter should stay with Li Jiumei. At a dumplings dinner, attended by Huang Tao’s younger sister Gu Man [Wang Xilu], her husband Ma Yue and their young son Xiaodong, Li Jiumei had insisted on talking the situation through.) Li Jiumei and Huang Xiaoyu finally have an opportunity to talk alone. The latter still cannot understand why her mother didn’t get a divorce and start a new life. Li Jiumei accuses Huang Xiaoyu of always taking her father’s side and bringing all the disasters on the family. (After the discovery of her father’s homosexuality, Huang Xiaoyu had burned all her father’s love letters and been scolded by her mother.) Feng Xi (Chen Zhengyuan) comes to a family dinner and Li Jiumei is relieved to discover that he no longer seems to be gay after all, as he now has a girlfriend, Xiaoxu, who is pregnant; but when Huang Xiaoyu later has a chat with Feng Xi, she learns the truth about him and Xiaoxu. Huang Xiaoyu then suspects her mother has come under the influence of a Buddhist cult member, Chen Yumeng (Dilian Fangxin), and is being taken advantage of. She reports the cult to the police, who don’t seem very interested. Finally, Huang Xiaoyu learns from her mother a secret that goes back to the latter’s university days.

REVIEW

A dysfunctional family finally seems to lay its ghosts to rest in A Dog Barking at the Moon 再见，南屏晚钟, a well-packaged but over-schematic first feature by writer-director Xiang Zi 相梓. Basically centred on the daughter’s relationship with her mother, but triggered by the revelation during her teens of her father’s homosexuality, the ambitiously structured script cuts back and forth between some five timelines in an almost irreal way that requires the viewer to just go with the flow as psychological layers are peeled back. As things progress, however, the sense that characters are simply being moved around at the director’s convenience finally makes the film more a clever exercise on paper than an involving cinematic experience.

Beijing-born Xiang, 31, who graduated in Economics and then studied film in New York, has several shorts to her credit. Despite being modestly funded (by friends and family), and shot (mostly in interiors) in only two-and-a-half weeks in Beijing in summer 2018, Dog has a thoroughly professional look, with consistently good-looking widescreen photography by Xiang’s Spanish husband and producer José Val Bal that often uses long, fixed takes but (thanks to continuous dialogue) never seems visually pretentious. The faults lie more in Xiang’s screenplay, which sidelines the father, despite his importance in the narrative, and never develops a dramatic head of steam in any one direction. To its credit, the script has a sly sense of humour amid all the family conflict – though to little avail overall.

The film opens with the birth of the daughter’s child, immediately cuts back some 30 years to her mother’s university days when she shared a room with a close female friend and was dating the father, and then reverts to a few months before the birth, when the daughter arrives from the US with her western husband after a seemingly long time away from home. After establishing the edgy relationship between the daughter and her parents, the audience finally learns the reason why in another flashback to her teens, when the father was caught canoodling with a young man. The main body of the movie is in the present day, as daughter and mother try to work out their differences, though it becomes increasingly centred on the conservative, stubborn mother, with a rather clumsy digression into her involvement with a Buddhist cult. (According to Xiang, this was inspired by her own family history.)

Though some story elements are almost wilfully obscure – including a dinner scene in which key characters are unseen – the general master-plan is fairly clear. But too much remains misty: the character of the father, his onetime lover, the exact problem between mother and daughter, and so on. A final revelation partly explains the mother’s attitude, but the whole subtext of homosexuality that runs through the film ends up only half explored and looking more like a deliberately controversial gambit, given the Mainland setting.

Veteran Na Renhua 娜仁花, 56, one of Inner Mongolia’s most famous actresses (A Girl from Hunan 湘女萧萧, 1987; A Mongolian Tale 黑骏马, 1995), is a commanding presence and does much to hold the fractured narrative together with her convincing performance as the embittered mother. As the equally strong-willed daughter, fellow Inner Mongolian actress Nan Ji 南吉 (aka Xiaosiqin’gaowa 小斯琴高娃, “Little Siqin’gaowa”), 32, mostly from TV drama, more than holds her own against her more experienced co-star, though her English is weak for someone supposedly living in the US and her character is fuzzily written. Character actor Wu Renyuan 吴任远 is given little to work with as the father.

The film’s English title means the futile lack of communication between the leads. The Chinese one literally means “Goodbye, Nanping Evening Bell”, a reference to the famous bell by West Lake, Zhejiang province, that tolled out to the mountains and lakes of Hangzhou, as well as being the title of a well-known song.

CREDITS

Presented by Acorn Studio (CN), Granadian Audiovisual (SP).

Script: Xiang Zi. Photography: José Val Bal. Editing: Xiang Zi. Music: Juan García Escudero. Art direction: Zhang Chen. Costumes: Lang Shuo. Sound: Zhang Hongxiang, Leo Dolgan.

Cast: Nan Ji [Xiaosiqin’gaowa] (Huang Xiaoyu), Na Renhua (Li Jiumei), Zhang Xinyue (young Huang Xiaoyu), Wu Renyuan (Huang Tao), Thomas Fiquet (Benjamin), Ming Xing (Liu Yuanyuan), Jiang Bing (young Li Jiumei), Chen Zhengyuan (Feng Xi), Dilian Fangxin (Chen Yumeng), Wang Xilu (Gu Man).

Premiere: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama), 11 Feb 2019.

Release: China, tba; Spain, tba.