Summer Is the Coldest Season
少女佳禾
China, 2019, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 100 mins.
Director: Zhou Sun 周笋.
Rating: 7/10.
Sensitive tale of a young teen’s conflicting emotions avoids the usual raging-hormones route.
STORY
A town in eastern China, the present day, summer. Thirteen-year-old Li Jiahe (Deng Enxi) is in her second year of junior high school and the cleverest girl in her class; but she is introverted and not liked by her fellow pupils. During a swimming lesson one day, the other girls leave the pool when she climbs in, complaining that the water smells of meat. (Li Jiahe’s father, Li Dali [Wu Guohua], who has tried to raise her since her mother’s death, is a former wrestler who now delivers cattle to an abattoir.) Angered by the humiliation, Li Jiahe later throws red paint into the pool while her classmates are in it. Her teacher, Sun (Tang Liang), tells her father that, although she’s become moody and ill-behaved, she’s a very good student; however, he recommends some extra-curricular tuition in Mathematics. Since retiring from wrestling, Li Dali has become increasingly dependant on medicines and alcohol, which consume a lot of his spare money; but because he wants his daughter to have a good education, he determines to find the money for her tuition somehow. Seeing her father is being cheated by an abattoir owner (Han Zhichao) who owes him money, Li Jiahe takes her revenge on the man and urges her father to fight back against such people. One day, by chance, she spots a young mechanic in a garage whom she recognises as the boy, Yu Lei (Li Gan), who caused her mother’s death. He was only sentenced to reform school, not prison, as he was under 14 at the time. Angry that he’s been released in less than three years, instead of serving the four he was sentenced to, Li Jiahe tries to get his address from Wu Qiming (Xia Wenbing), the family’s lawyer at the time, but the latter refuses on professional grounds. Li Jiahe starts following him around, and eventually is invited by him to eat with his group of layabout friends. She deliberately leaves behind her backpack as an excuse to see him again. As her 14th birthday approaches, and Li Jiahe spends more time with Yu Lei and finds he’s not exactly as she had pictured him, she is torn between her obsessive desire for revenge and other feelings she can’t express.
REVIEW
A sensitive tale of early teendom that’s occasionally let down by being too “filmy”, Summer Is the Coldest Month 少女佳禾 is a notable feature debut by film-maker Zhou Sun 周笋, 38, following the interesting 17-minute short Light in the Night 蓝光水母 (2013), her graduation film at Beijing Film Academy. Held together by a strong trio of lead performances and a script that cleverly keeps the viewer hooked until the end, it’s an interesting riff on female-adolescent films that isn’t just a story of raging hormones. After festival showings, it opened commercially in the Mainland at the end of last year, taking RMB7.8 million, a respectable figure given its size and lack of star names.
Like Zhou’s short, Summer also focuses on the workings of a marginally disturbed, obsessive mind. In Light it was that of a young single mother; in Summer it’s a soon-to-be-14 junior high schooler, still emotionally scarred by the death of her mother, who comes face to face with the boy, now in his late teens, responsible for the crime. Both films deal with a sense of otherness, of feeling disconnected from regular society, though not in the usual arty way. Summer’s main character, Li Jiahe, idolised her mum and is now distant from her father, a kind but uneducated guy who used to be a professional wrestler but now delivers cattle to an abattoir. At school, Li Jiahe is a clever student but anti-social: in a striking opening sequence, when picked on by her classmates, she fights back, and later urges her dad to do the same when she sees him being cheated at work.
Li Jiahe’s simmering anger/pain finds a focus when she spots her mother’s killer, Yu Lei, who’s been let out early from the reform school he was sent to, being just below the legal age at the time for a proper prison sentence. Obsessed with delivering the justice she thinks he never got, Li Jiahe stalks him and infiltrates his circle of layabout friends, but then finds he’s not as she expected. To its credit, Zhou’s screenplay never makes explicit the obvious sexual attraction she starts to feel for him, mainly because she can’t even express it herself. Instead, the film concentrates on her obsessive pursuit of him, as well as her gradual rapprochement with her father, as she gradually comes to terms with her mercurial teenage emotions.
Between all this thread flashbacks showing life with her mother, finally leading to the crime itself, shown near the end. Till then, the audience has seen only the girl’s outrage at what happened; by the film’s end it is in possession of all the facts. The resolution is somewhat pat and too neat, but it’s handled with simplicity and a lack of melodrama. The reconciliation with her father is especially good, in a light, charming way.
Much of the film wouldn’t work so well without the lead playing of Chongqing-born actress Deng Enxi 邓恩熙, 15, who previously showed a talent for complex hidden feelings in her double role in Last Letter 你好，之华 (2018), and went on to show flashes of nettle as the teenage orphan in Back to the Wharf 风平浪静 (2020). As the silent, fearless and impulsive Li Jiahe – in many respects not an especially sympathetic character – Deng’s largely blank-faced performance forces the viewer to guess at what is motivating her emotions at any one time – hate, hormones or heartstrings. In his first major role in a feature, Harbin-born Li Gan 李感, 30, looks a tad old for the 17-year-old Yu Lei but has good chemistry with Deng and catches his character’s ambiguity, a sympathetic, half-reformed lout who still could go either way. At times, however, he’s let down by Zhou’s over-knowing, filmy dialogue, such as when Yu Lei quotes a Polish film about the role that chance plays in life, and then waxes philosophical on the subject. Here, as in a few other instances (such as a motivating quote from Marie Curie that Li Jiahe eyes at school), the script strikes a false note that’s at odds with the film’s realism.
Giving quiet support to Deng’s performance is character actor Wu Guohua 吴国华 as the girl’s rough-diamond father. Also notable is Li Mo 李茉, aka Li Yichen 李依宸, as a straight-talking woman in Yu Lei’s group who recognises Li Jiahe’s conflicted feelings. As the girl’s devoted mother in the sunny flashbacks, Li Juan 李娟 contributes a graceful warmth in line with the idealised visuals.
Technical credits are all of a high order, especially the photography by Ying Jie 应杰 that often plays with light. (Zhou studied oil painting at art college in her native Jiangxi province, and that influence can also be seen in her 2013 short.) Fine, too, is the smooth editing by the experienced Zhu Lin 朱琳 (Dying to Survive 我不是药神, 2018; The Shadow Play 风中有朵雨做的云, 2018; Miss Forever 一生有你2019, 2019). Shot around Taizhou, Zhejiang province, the film is also known as Becoming Li Jiahe, a much better English title than the clever-sounding but meaningless official one. The Chinese simply means “Young Girl Jiahe”.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Teli Pictures (CN), Easy Media (Jiangsu) (CN).
Script: Zhou Sun. Photography: Ying Jie. Editing: Zhu Lin. Music: Bai Shui. Art direction: Liu Yongheng. Styling: Ding Zhe’ni. Sound: Chen Qi, Han Zhichao, Xu Ze.
Cast: Deng Enxi (Li Jiahe), Li Gan (Yu Lei/Yu Tou/Fishhead), Wu Guohua (Li Dali, Li Jiahe’s father), Li Juan (Shen Xinzhi, Li Jiahe’s mother), Li Mo [Li Yichen] (Chen Manli, woman in group), Wang Zichen (Chen Mosheng), Zhang Jiawen (Huang Mao/Yellow Hair), Tang Liang (Sun, teacher), Zhang Zhengwu (Jin Lei, tubby pupil), Luo Milan, Li Xingyue (female pupils), Chen Rui (swimming teacher), Chen Miaowen (Xiaowen, nail-bar employee), Zhang Xiyan (Fei, nail-bar owner), Han Zhichao (Hui, abbatoir owner), Li Xinfang (garage owner), Zhou Linglong (jewellery-shop owner), Xia Wenbing (Wu Qiming, lawyer), Qin Hang (Wu, father’s wrestling friend), Chen Xuhua (Da Gou/Big Dog).
Premiere: Pingyao Film Festival (Crouching Tigers), 10 Oct 2019.
Release: China, 11 Dec 2020.