NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL July 15-28, 2022

[Chris Knipp]

LI GEN: BEFORE NEXT SPRING / 如果有一天我将会离开你 (2021)


XIE CHENGZE AND QIU TIAN IN BEFORE NEXT SPRING

People come, people go, nothing ever happens, but we enter many stories in this tale of Chinese emigrants and students in Japan gathered around a Chinese restaurant in a Tokyo suburb.

Events are set in a suburban area near Tokyo, Fuchinobe. The focus is Chinese emigrants and exchange students in Japan taking courses to qualify as students and working at multiple jobs to support themselves and send money home.

Through incidents, a mood accumulates in this first feature by a director who has previously done documentaries. He builds on his own personal experiences as a foreign exchange student in Japan. The young actors are fresh and appealing. The characters have in common working and gathering at a Chinese restaurant, Nankokute.

Perhaps the main character is the one-year resident, tall, sweet, shy young Li Xiaoli (Xie Chengze) who is treated as a doofus, and may be Li Gen's alter ego. After many efforts he gets a job at the restaurant through cute former classmate Qiu Qiu (Qiu Tian), and thus meets Zhao Aoki (Niu Chiau. Early episodes feature Zhao, a bitter young half-Japanese, half-Chinese man. He works at multiple jobs and sends money home but is also stealing money from a bank account with his father's bank card, and through that gets arrested, held in jail, and eventually deported.

When Li Xiaoli visits Zhao in jail, the latter gives him a message for Qiu Qiu, who's very pretty and winds up working like a geisha at a restaurant, and expresses indifference to Zhao. Toughened feelings, hardened hearts: but sentimentality in the film, which weeps over an old man who comes back to the restaurant after his wife has died; and niceness on the part of the innocent Li Xiaoli.

There is parallel thread about cancer. A young women with cancer (Xi Qi) bonds with an old lady at the hospital, also a customer at the restaurant. She is Li Xiaoli's older sister, and lives with another Chinese man she fights with. Li Xiaoli is with his sister at the hospital when she has surgery for uterine cancer. But it is all interconnected; that is the art of this kind of piece. There is even the Nankokute cook, who has longed for many years to bring his family to Japan but one evening admits may now have lost the courage to do so. As for Li Xiaoli, he's only in Japan for a year, and when the time comes to an end, he's off. But at the end he overcomes his native shyness for a while to promote the restaurant, which is losing customers, by boldly promoting it out on the sidewalk. He has become emboldened and he has come to care.

This film is precisely observed and engrossing. I'll echo Maria Castaldo, an Italian reviewer whose description of the film is one of the few I can find, who credits Li Gan here with "tenderness and authenticity," and "without lapsing into pathos," but rather "dosing the sweetness," as is done "for the almond syrup in tofu sweets" as specified in a scene in the film. Besides the sourness and the sweetness, there is also the harshness: the couple who fight and Zhao embittered by a drunken and abusive father. In these scenes there is little that is new, but they draw you in anyway.

A significant flaw in the English subtitling is its failure to distinguish where the dialogue being rendered in any one moment is in Mandarin or Japanese. This matters, for following the action, of course, and it is constantly changing.

Before Next Spring如果有一天我将会离开你, 107 mins., debuted at Udine Far East Film Festival Jul. 1, 2021; also Beijing Sept. 19, 2021. Screened for this review as part of NYAFF 2022. (North American Premiere.)

Friday Jul 29, 9:30pm (Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, Asia Society)