The plot synopsis and poster family portrait are easy to make people look at "Don't Tell Her" with the expectation of watching another "Golden Romance", especially the brilliant performances in "Golden Gold" and "Beauty from the Sea" Okefina will give people the illusion of popcorn comedy. But soon, these preconceived judgments slowly disappeared during the viewing process.
When the protagonist Billie’s parents decided to conceal her lung cancer from her grandmother and told her not to return to China because of her emotional exposure, I even thought it would be a cliché story that caused a plot conflict with a scam. The snowball of lies would be Rolling bigger and bigger will eventually be pierced in the oolong, and the discussion of cultural differences around the "said or not tell her" will be hidden in the ending of reunion. However, the trend of the plot of "Don't Tell Her" has abandoned the clichés of the traditional narrative model.
Before the bad news about her grandmother suffering from cancer, Billie's life in New York was run aground by a reef crashing into the beach. Burdened with the sacrifices and hard work of her parents, she was brought to the United States with high hopes since she was young. At the intersection of her thirty-year-old life, Billie was unable to find a stable job. Her Guggenheim researcher's application was rejected, and her landlord would be swept out if she couldn't make ends meet, and she would have to endure her mother's ridicule when she went home to borrow the washing machine. The soft and cold tones of the film, the interweaving of violin and vocals as the background music, the language of the lens in a loose and gentle rhythm, eloquently tells this story of mixed joy and sadness.
The news that grandma was suffering from cancer within a few days was packaged by the whole family as a happy event for his cousin Haohao. The Haiyan (Billy's father) family living in the United States and the beach family living in Japan used this as a cover to return to their hometown to visit grandma. . The celebration and reunion in name are big joys, but in fact it is the last farewell to see grandma. Compared with the embarrassing confrontation between her parents, Billie and her grandma are obviously closer to each other. The concern for grandma and the moral distress of concealing the truth are like a straw that overwhelms Billie’s emotional sustenance. She hides her family members and is overdrawn. After receiving a credit card, he flew back to Changchun to visit his grandmother.
Although it is not told in the first person, the film is closer to the perspective of a confused and troubled second-generation Chinese immigrant than the self-narrative. How to deal with "white lies" that conceal the condition? How to deal with unfamiliar Chinese relatives and family customs? How to answer the historical dilemma that the overly curious hotel attendant repeatedly asks "Is it better for China or the United States?" How do you recall the happy time with your grandparents in your childhood in Changchun, where the towers and tall buildings stand? Billie who came to China was plagued by the ensuing problems.
Billie never told the truth, nor tried to use the "correctness" of American law to set things right. She cautiously questioned the right and wrong of the people around her, stumbling to deal with the relationship with her parents, squeezing out a smile and working hard to integrate with her Chinese relatives, looking for clues about her childhood home in the new land of the Changchun Economic Development Zone, and even at the end, it was She took the initiative to rewrite the inspection report for her grandma. But this does not mean a compromise or concession, just like Michelle Yeoh in "Golden Romance" easily let American Cinderella take the superficial lust of the moral high ground.
The entrance to the film to cut into foreign cultural differences is "Should you tell her", but in fact the script did not allow the characters to see the right or wrong of the lie for too long, nor did it take the right position as the final result. The director cleverly used humorous plots to dispel the weight of life caused by cancer and dying farewell, and avoided engulfing the audience with sensational and moving, and put more thinking back on Billie itself. On the one hand, emotions drove Billie to accompany her grandma for the last time, on the other hand, the bottleneck in life forced her to re-examine herself, recall the bourgeois American air she breathed, and look back at Changchun, China, where she was connected by blood. Under the grief of losing a loved one, there is another crisis of Billie hidden: the difficulty of identity-she has not been able to fully become a thorough American, but the beautiful and vague memories of the countryside in her memory are changing with each passing day. China disappeared.
The lens is attached to Billie's eyes, recording the fashionable and weird hotels, massage rooms and restaurants, the barbecue smoke in the West Er Hutong of Hongqi Street, the blank faces of the old people downstairs in the old residential area and many people sticking to their mobile phones. On the line of sight. She silently observed the bright guns and the arrows on the adults' dining table, the funny embarrassment of Haohao and Aiko in the luxurious photo studio, and also saw everyone at the wedding banquet express their love for grandma in different ways. In the face of the strange hometown, Billy did not use the American experience in the process of growing up to resist, but slowly changed from doubt and confusion to respectful in the entanglement and separation of consciousness, culture and space. Explore to try to bridge the cultural differences and the pain of family generations.
With the gradual fading of the omnipotent and omnipotent vision of the fiction, the film did not use exaggerated contrast and dramatic design to highlight the different psychological processes in the Chinese and Western contexts, but instead portrayed the true face of life in a sincere manner. In the relationship between the old and the new urban space and the layers of interpersonal communication, Haohao’s hasty wedding has become a hodgepodge of Chinese, Japanese, and American cultures. The emotional expression of the film has changed from the previous depressed and unhappy depression to a warm and affectionate one. Ridiculously, the camera's rhythm suddenly accelerated when he was drunk, and finally slowed down in Haohao's sudden and uncontrollable crying. The sadness of life and death was woven into the celebration of family reunion, which transcended cultural differences. The normal life of racial separation.
"Don't Tell Her" is not flawless. In the eyes of Chinese audiences, the Chinese lines are not smooth enough, and the addition of non-professional actors is a bit blunt. Okefina's Mandarin is crooked, and it is inevitable that people are like "people who get cancer are not far from death." The common saying of sings out the stereotype of China in the western world. But these cannot conceal the sincerity of the movie to move people's hearts.
As the movie ends, Billie and her parents set off for a taxi to the airport, bidding farewell to her grandmother who waved her hand downstairs and refused to leave, and gradually drove away from the uplifted city center of Changchun, passing through the dust on the elevated bridge. , Towards the next journey of life. Only by personal experience, can I understand that this unconsciously sensational parting scene has real weight in the leisurely understatement.
I know the thickness of the red envelope that grandma puts on Billie. I know that grandma will wait until the taxi disappears at the end of the field of vision before staggering upstairs. I also know that my mother will turn red and tears in her eyes, but I don’t. What I know is how many times there are to return home after leaving, how many companions there are, and whether there is anyone waiting.
I wish the elders all the best and good health.
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