Like Synonyms, Wang Xiaoshuai’s three-hour melodrama So Long, My Son screened late in this year’s edition, and it’s won well-deserved best actor and actress Silver Bears for Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei. They portray factory workers Yaojun and Liyun, who have lost their son due to the negligence of his friend, the child of Yaojun and Liyun’s close friends. “Wang’s most ambitious if somewhat unwieldy film,” as Sight & Sound editor Nick James puts it, opens in the 1980s and swerves up and down a timeline that will eventually lead to the present, raising questions along the way that will only be answered at screenwriters Wang and A. Mei’s leisure. “Even though adjoining scenes may have happened years apart,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety, “they are arranged so they’re cresting a similar emotional tide, so rather than the usual cantering, episodic rhythm of the epoch-spanning epic, the runtime flies by with the taut fluidity of traditional three-act structure.”
The Criterion Collection,
February 20th, 2019
David Hudson
