New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

LIANG MING: CAREFREE DAYS (2023)

The excitement of burgeoning doom

Many of the admiring things Jessica Kiang says in her Variety review of actor Liang Ming's 2019 directorial debut Wisdom Tooth (not seen by me) could be applied almost equally well to this sophomore feature, this one based on a novel (or novella?) of Ban Yu. (Notice of the debut by Wendy Ide in Screen Daily though briefer is similarly admiring.) Liang Ming's work has the same chaotic energy and packed foregrounds (and backgrounds) you get in Jia Zhang-ke's early movies. This one is almost overwhelming in its richness and complexity and overlapping of one event on another. It is just in its overall trajectory's arc toward numb tragedy that it disappoints, seeming to reflect a better grasp of the parts than of the whole. Can a protagonist's arc be called "tragic" when she can also be considered doomed from the start? Or does this matter?

The focus is Xu Lingling (Lyu Xingchen, also in Wisdom Tooth), who lives in Shenyang, a northeastern Chinese city, usually the setting of Ban Yu's writing, that the film blurbs describe as "decaying" ; this may be mistaken: it just looks busy, crowded and chaotic. Some of the people in the foreground here seem to be going to hell, but doing so with energy and aplomb. Xu is diagnosed with kidney failure. We don't know why, but she will die of uremia without frequent dialysis, and she needs a kidney transplant. Her mother pledges to support, but before you know it, she has gotten suddenly sick and died. Xu's estranged father appears now and offers to help, but he is a serial seducer wrapped up in himself, though he does perform some acts of generosity.

Eager for companionship and love and unable to be alone, Xu finds her close friend Tan Na (Li Xueqin) and old classmate Zhao Dongyang (Zhao Bingrui), who help her. With the three of them, Carefree Days becomes a road trip, even as we know that Xu can't go far or for long without dialysis, and during the second half of the trip the symptoms of uremia are there: nausea, lack of appetite, fatigue. She barely makes it back home - or does she? Much of this film is full of the sickly excitement of burgeoning doom, where joy and frivolity always have an edge.

Some of the details of this movie are implausible, or perhaps it's just that though its two-hours-plus length seems overlong, it's not long enough to cram in all the events of an overstuffed novel (or even novella). Xu at one point takes on a job that she can't possibly do. Later she enters a studio and darts back out again: on a platform she has seen her father posing nude for artists.

The analogy with films like Jia's 1998 Platform and 2002 Unknown Pleasures (the ironic title analogous to Carefree Days) is a very imperfect one because Jia is presenting panoramas linked to a time. Even the two young losers of Unknown Pleasures are seen in a national and historical perspective. Carefree Days, on the other hand, is full of intense, intimate moments and big closeups. Only at the end it may draw back a bit from Xu as if to see her finally as an object, helpless and alone. Recently Mike D'Angelo commented on Stephen Frears' The Hit that he likes "almost every individual moment" yet finds that "it fails to coalesce in a satisfying way," and this comes close to my feeling aboutCarefree Days. I feel that Liang Ming has exciting skills as a filmmaker. The ability to create burgeoning life and make people and their every moment seem so natural and real is unusual and to be cherished. But here after a while, as the trip wears on, there start to be a few too many "individual moments" to care in the same way about them as one did early on. And so the skills wind up seeming to be used rather heedlessly. Nonetheless, this is a filmmaker to watch. Carefree Days deserves to be seen and reviewed by Jessica and Wendy, and all the rest. So far it seems to have slipped through the cracks.

Carefree Days 逍遥游 (Xiao yao you, "Carefree Journey"), 122 min., debuted Sept. 22, 2023 at San Sebastián. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.

SCHEDULE:
Thursday Jul 18, 3:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Sunday Jul 21, 1:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57