The Farewell | Little White Lies

The Farewell

18 Sep 2019 / Released: 20 Sep 2019

Words by Carol Grant

Directed by Lulu Wang

Starring Awkwafina, Diana Lin, and Tzi Ma

Elderly woman and young woman sitting at a table filled with various dishes, embracing each other affectionately.
Elderly woman and young woman sitting at a table filled with various dishes, embracing each other affectionately.
4

Anticipation.

A rare indie Chinese-American co-production headed by rising star Awkwafina.

4

Enjoyment.

A beautifully rendered tragicomedy with terrific performances.

4

In Retrospect.

Goes softly-softly on the Big Themes, but packs an emotional wallop.

Based on her own expe­ri­ences, Lulu Wang tells the sto­ry of a Chi­nese-Amer­i­can fam­i­ly who come togeth­er dur­ing a fam­i­ly crisis.

At 90 years old, my Fil­ipino grandmother’s eye­sight has gone bad. Her hear­ing is even worse. Though she may see her 25-year-old grand­daugh­ter in front of her, she hears my voice and still calls me by my dead­name, my male” name.

Between this and the entrenched Catholic con­ser­vatism in the fam­i­ly, I find myself unable to vis­it my grand­moth­er or my extend­ed fam­i­ly, either in Stock­ton, Cal­i­for­nia where they cur­rent­ly reside, or the Philip­pines, the home they fre­quent­ly return to. I yearn to learn more about my cul­ture, and with the knowl­edge that my grandmother’s time may come any day now, I can’t tell when – if ever – I’ll be able to see them again.

My fam­i­ly dif­fers incred­i­bly from the one in Lulu Wang s semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film The Farewell: it’s an extend­ed Chi­nese clan who, upon learn­ing that matri­arch Nai Nai (first-time actor Shuzhen Zhao, deliv­er­ing a knock­out per­for­mance) has ter­mi­nal can­cer, decide to keep the diag­no­sis to them­selves and stage a fake wed­ding as an excuse to bring the entire fam­i­ly togeth­er before Nai Nai’s even­tu­al depar­ture. Yet I couldn’t help but see my own Asian fam­i­ly reflect­ed in Wang’s lens.

There’s a temp­ta­tion among films like this, espe­cial­ly Chi­nese-Amer­i­can co-pro­duc­tions, to strive for faux-uni­ver­sal­i­ty by remov­ing or damp­en­ing cul­tur­al speci­fici­ty, in an attempt to make the work palat­able for any” audi­ence (often code for white peo­ple”). The Farewell eschews that for a keen pre­ci­sion and clar­i­ty of expres­sion, implic­it­ly trust­ing its audi­ence to empathise.

Wang’s con­fi­dent direc­tion cer­tain­ly sup­ports this empa­thet­ic gaze, as she crafts pre­cise com­po­si­tions that recall world cin­e­ma mas­ters like Abbas Kiarosta­mi and Apichat­pong Weerasethakul, while also main­tain­ing the loose­ness and com­fort of a home movie. Every­one from Awk­wa­fi­na, as the immi­grant young adult Bil­li, to Diana Lin’s stern yet soft-heart­ed moth­er, inter­acts in these care­ful­ly aligned spaces, enjoy­ing effort­less free­dom as they move in and out of frame, hug and dance awk­ward­ly, argue either out of earshot of estranged fam­i­ly mem­bers, or in lan­guages that can­not be under­stood. Where these spaces might have felt fuss­i­ly con­trolled in the hands of a less­er direc­tor, Wang’s feel lived-in and authentic.

Yet Wang is unafraid of mess­ing with the com­fort of these spaces, fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing them with the lin­guis­tic and cul­tur­al bar­ri­ers pre­sent­ed at the film’s core. This is best exem­pli­fied in a scene where Bil­li argues with her moth­er about the dif­fi­cul­ty of accus­tom­ing her­self to immi­grant life in Amer­i­ca at an ear­ly age, while oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers scour the car­pets for a miss­ing ear­ring, total­ly unaware of the cul­tur­al bat­tle­grounds being drawn around them.

The Farewell pro­vokes a lot of ques­tions regard­ing cul­tur­al tra­di­tion, taboo and dif­fer­ences between its immi­grant and non-immi­grant char­ac­ters, to which the film sad­ly doesn’t pro­vide many answers. Wang’s per­spec­tive cer­tain­ly val­ues sub­jec­tive cathar­sis over grasp­ing at its more intel­lec­tu­al quan­daries in a sat­is­fy­ing way. But pon­der­ing the fact that I am now con­sid­er­ing vis­it­ing my fam­i­ly for the first time in years, maybe just bring­ing these ques­tions to the fore is enough.

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