Der schattenlose Turm

Premiered back at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Zhang Lu is a filmmaker I haven't been familiar with and I have seen some of his Korean works which I have enjoyed but didn't quite emotionally connect with, The Shadowless Tower might be my favorite one of his works so far.

Lu is able to portray a quiet yet meditative narrative about two wandering souls who search for something more within themselves with beautiful camerawork that captures the setting and atmosphere and interesting dialogue conversations between the characters. Many of the writing choices from Lu are interesting as it explores navigation of life, Chinese culture and cores between the soul.

All of the performances were pretty good as each performance enhances the realism of the setting. Including the child actor as well. The sound design is good, the characters are interesting and the pacing, while at times can be too slow, is engaging.

Overall, a really good movie.

I have seen two other movies by Zhang Lu, set in Korea, with Korean actors, and I felt dissatisfied to some extent with both of them. This is the one I liked best. I guess I resonate much more with the Chinese-ness of the characters. They are more relatable in a way, they make much more sense to me. I also liked the locales, the old houses and streets. It is a bloated movie, there are scenes that could've been cut, maybe a good half hour of it. But this resonated with me, I found myself interested and drawn to some of the characters and their stories. I liked Ouyang Wenhui the least probably, unlike Park So-dam's character in Ode to the Goose. But the rest of them I wanted to know more about. Even Gu's poor renter has a pretty good scene. His sister, daughter, brother-in-law, his ex, his old school friends, his dad, his mom. I wanted more time with them instead of semi-dreamscape passages but it's ok. I'm glad I had the patience for it.

A quiet study in the disappointments in life, told primarily from the perspective of a middle-aged man who is divorced from his wife, estranged from his father, and has set aside his dreams of writing poetry to become an online food critic. He develops a relationship with the much younger woman who takes photographs for him, and despite her quirky charm, we find that she's dealing with her own emotional baggage stemming from being adopted as a child. Meanwhile his elderly father who once served a year of hard labor for allegedly groping a woman on a bus, a charge he denied (and we're led to believe was untrue), has been bicycling 300km to Beijing to catch glimpses of him and his sister on their birthdays, unbeknownst to them. The man's ex-wife? Terminal cancer. His friends? They range from having multiple divorces, to being despondent over never having married, to committing suicide.

That should give you an idea for the depressing tone of the film, as all of these dreary things are slathered on rather thick. The only source of lightness is the man's adorable little daughter, who I wish we had seen more of. I don't count the manic pixie dream girl character as adding a lot of brightness because even she felt downbeat. Her character being a trope is part of a bigger problem though - these are all cliché characters, even if the performances from are all solid and feel natural. It's a shame because the film is so beautifully shot, and one I really wanted to like. I respected what it was trying to do but it felt lethargic and overlong, without really plumbing the depths of the things it played around with.