Angus Reid reviews Brief History Of A Family, directed by Lin Jianjie
In 1928 the Soviet director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay, The Cinematographic Principle And The Ideogram, in which he likened the ideal film to a sequence of eastern ideograms, or characters, in collision with each other. Continuity across cuts is less important than conflict because conflict gives rise to a concept in the mind of the viewer.
In this film debut director Lin Jianjie demonstrates the perfection of this technique in contemporary cinema. From the very first shot we are being presented with a sequence of highly controlled cinematic ideograms, each one an exquisitely deliberate act of framing, zooming and tracking, combined with an equally deliberate statement in sound.
This method is so objective as to position the viewer in an exhilaratingly free and wide-open frame of reference — we are as aware of the characters’ class and environment as we are of their inner lives. It has the scientific exactitude of a biologist staring into a petri dish.
The themes are the Chinese family in the aftermath of the one child policy, and the class tensions that have arisen alongside a newly affluent middle-class minority.
The plot is that of Highsmith’s Ripley, or Pasolini’s Theorem: a young man enters a bourgeois family to seduce them one by one, to expose the shallow foundations of their privilege, and drive them mad. There is even the suggestion that the invasive stranger could be a metaphor for the coronavirus.
Western critics have admired it as a psychological study but you feel that Chinese audiences might see it differently, as a poker-faced satire of the neo-bourgeois taste for everything anglophone, be it tennis, Ivy League universities or Harry Potter. This drawn-out agony of a family that self-harms might even be funny, a merciless comedy of repressed emotions, and a cautionary tale.
But the pristine clarity of the shotmaking, the dialectical logic of its narrative, with all those juicy collisions, and the mask-like understatement of the acting — another Eisenstein fetish — set this apart. To watch it feels like reading a sentence in Mandarin that perfectly describes the reality of that country and the psychology of its people.
Lin has the same touch as the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, but coupled to a thrilling, high intensity focus on the glossy surfaces and impassive faces of the contemporary world we share.
This is a must for our readers, a revelation, and a profoundly beautiful, tense and satisfying movie.
This article is republished from the Morning Star.
