Promise 背影

Story

Shuanggang township, Poyang county, Shangrao, Jiangxi province, China, the present day. Xu Chunxiu (Xu Huijin), 13, lives with her widowed father (Wu Shuimei), almost 50, a collective farm worker. Chunxiu's mother died some seven years ago and her grandmother is crippled and does not have long to live. Chunxiu's teacher tells her father that Chunxiu has the potential to be a good student but always seems distracted during class. Her father is also behind on paying her school fees. Chunxiu urges her father to get re-married, and matchmaker Liu (Cao Ping'ai) recommends a 36-year-old widow, Guilan (Sun Huaping), who has a daughter, Li Qiaozhen (Fang Yuan), who is Chunxiu's age. The two girls get along, and Chunxiu's father marries Guilan, who is a devoted wife and works alongside him in the fields. But both Chunxiu's father and Guilan are hiding terrible secrets.

Review

Based on a novel by Jiangxi writer CHENG Hui 程暉, Promise 背影 (2011) is a rural family drama whose placid surfaces and lack of much action conceal considerable dark undercurrents. Mainland Chinese cinema — especially the kind that makes it to western festivals — is not short of slow-moving dramas stressing the tedium and conservatism of countryside life, but this first feature by writer-director PAN Shi 磐石, who previously worked in advertising and publishing, manages to be moderately paced and formally shot, with a minimum of dialogue, without becoming boring or needlessly arty.

The film initially seems to be through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl, Chunxiu, introduced in a long-held shot of her staring through the window of her classroom instead of listening to the teacher. Chunxiu is a bright student but a dreamer, who seems to be preoccupied by family matters: her mother died seven or so years ago and she yearns for her father, a struggling collective farmer, to remarry so she can have a mother. The film avoids the usual cliches of family abuse: her father, though poor, is a kind man, and he finally agrees to marry a widow who has a daughter the same age as Chunxiu. Chunxiu and the daughter bond, and the new wife, Guilan, proves to be a hard-working woman.

The twists to this simple, unremarkable story start coming at the midway point, and are almost glancingly introduced. Although by then the movie's focus has drifted away from Chunxiu to the two adults (and their own secrets), it returns to the children in the film's most emotionally powerful scene, when the father has to take a tough decision between the two. A postscript, set eight years later, ends the story on an optimistic, life-goes-on note. Overall, the movie is a modest but quietly impressive debut.

Pan draws a range of performances from his non-professional cast — topped by XU Huijin 徐惠君 as Chunxiu, WU Shuimei 吳水美 as the taciturn father andSUN Huaping 孫華萍 as Guilan — that seem absolutely authentic while still having a cinematic feel. Largely using a fixed viewpoint, the well-composed widescreen photography by LIU Yonghong 劉勇宏 captures the region (about 500 kilometres southwest of Shanghai) without any over-prettification. Dialogue is largely in the local Poyang dialect. The Chinese title literally means Rear View.