The most touching scene of “The First Taste of Loneliness” is not actually the most tearful scene. Gu You’s heartfelt family portrait opens with a long, painful scene of three women—a mother, daughter, and granddaughter—standing vigil at the bedside of their beloved husband, father, and grandfather as his long battle with pancreatic cancer comes to an end. Emotions are loud and loud; The camera looks closely at their pain. But a little later, it’s a quieter, calmer moment that really touches the heart. Shortly after his father’s death, Yue (Zhou Xun) opens the last jar of his famous homemade pickles, tastes it, and declares it a good batch, with the bittersweet knowledge that he’ll never be able to make it again.
“The First Taste of Loneliness” is at its best when it focuses on such small but important day-to-day details. It may be overdone in its depiction of the immediate, intense pain of grief, but the bulk of this overlong film is given over to a more patient, measured, and exquisitely observed study of how life reshapes itself around an absence—as Yue, her mother Luna (Xi Meijuan), and teenage daughter Moon (Wang Shengdi) grapple with sadness, relief, and the slight sense of betrayal that comes with moving on, they make room for the dead man’s spirit in their own space. is alive.
Shot and structured with large-scale elegance to counteract the intimacy of storytelling, the film is the thrilling final entry in Gu’s “Landscape” trilogy, which began with Gu’s first film, “Living in the Fuchun Mountains,” which premiered at Cannes in 2019, and continued with 2023’s “Residence by the West Lake”; These three films are linked not directly by characters or narratives, but by a common style of melancholy family portraiture. “Loneliness,” which premiered in the Busan Film Festival’s main competition, once again demonstrates the filmmaker’s formal prowess with its preponderance of assertively floating pans and densely packed sets. It has a broader, more populist streak than its predecessors, which could give it greater global distribution, but it also has artistic drawbacks: An over-reliance on tacky, sentimental ballads to unnecessarily express characters’ emotions is a particular drawback.
Fairly revealing dialogue informs us that Yue, formerly a fashion director in Beijing, recently returned with Moon to the family apartment in the southeastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. Home to Luna and her late husband for decades, it’s a vast, rambling space with stunning views of the Qiantang River and a tangle of stories in Zhou Xingyu’s excellent production design. Mikiya Takimoto’s camera sits lovingly on stacked bookshelves (not even the old cassette tapes have been thrown away) and desktop computers filled with knick-knacks, notes, and photographs that briefly reveal a life rich in love. Even in death, the man maintains a palpable presence in the house.
But it may be time for at least some remnants of the past to make way for the present. Luna begs the recently divorced Yue not to get stuck in conservatism in both her career and her relationships; but Luna also needs to make some changes. She tentatively accepts the romantic overtures of another man, Xu (Xu Chaoying), and opens herself up to a kind of happiness that she has largely forgotten how to feel. Meanwhile, Moon is struggling in school but on the verge of adulthood; Yue is forced to relinquish her maternal responsibilities to some extent as the young woman begins to make her own decisions in her life.
The script, written by Gu with Yang Yikun, delicately weaves these three arcs so that each woman’s new freedoms complement those of the others, while Takimoto’s bold camerawork in watercolor hues of misty gray and mossy green often physically connects the stories with slow, sweeping movements. And while the performances of the three leads are delicately synchronized, Xi Meijuan is particularly poignant as a widow trying to maintain her grief-stricken manners while embracing fresh experiences and sources of joy: A beautiful scene in which she and Xu dance with other couples in a public square hits just the right note of romantic sentimentality tempered with wistful sadness. If “First Taste of Loneliness” hits overly sentimental notes elsewhere — literally so, in Sylvian Wang’s wistful, piano-heavy score — it never feels cynical or emotionally produced. Moments of exaggeration that lead to a lighter, gentler state of serenity are entirely human.