February 24, 2020
I’ve seen close to seven hundred films, but I had never cried and laughed at the same exact moment until I took Lufthansa flight 426 from Frankfurt to Philadelphia. Halfway over the Atlantic, with a small screen, over the din of air whooshing over the wings and the Airbus turbines blaring, with strangers coughing out Coronavirus in my personal space, with all of that preventing emotional investment in its story, The Farewell managed to do it.
In that scene, Haibin (Jiang Yongbo) is hosting his son’s wedding in China. But the wedding is a front, a concoction to fool Haibin’s mother Nai Nai (a lively force in Zhao Shu-zhen) that her family have reunited from all over the world for some other reason than that she is dying of lung cancer with only months to live. All of the family, including Awkwafina’s sharp Billi, know this. And they’ve all willingly withheld the diagnosis from Nai Nai in order to protect her from the despair it might cause.
Haibin takes the stage to toast his son and new daughter-in-law. We know anything he says to them would be farcical. And everyone is attending in the belief that this is their last hurrah with Nai Nai. This is the moment he turns to his mother and eulogizes her. He so carefully treads to keep the truth from coming out that we can’t help but laugh, so brazenly guides the spotlight away from where it should be at a wedding that we can’t help but cringe, so deeply and solemnly bows to her that even a Westerner can’t help being moved.
The only way this deception works is for the entire family to act unanimously in its adoption and relentless in its execution. One moment of weakness would ruin it. It is a fully Eastern, collective project. Billi starts as the dissenting opinion, but she reluctantly joins in. Like ours, her conscience is not so resolved as to countermand her family’s united determination. In the end she is not the only one struggling to reconcile her American individualism with their deceit. “In America this would be illegal,” Billi’s Americanized father argues with his brother Haibin, who also years ago left China, but for Japan. A person has a right to know, indeed must know. But that is the difference between East and West, Haibin says. “It is our duty to bear the pain for her.” Telling her merely shifts the burden the family is bearing onto Nai Nai so that she cannot live as joyously as she does now. And if you cite the golden rule, we have a riposte. What would Nai Nai herself think of this plan? It turns out we have a creative, critical answer to that.
Lulu Wang raises so many deep questions, the higher callings we pine for films to beckon us toward, that we might call her a philosopher-filmmaker in the way the Scots honor their warrior-poets. Of course there’s the classic: Do you want to know bad news or live on blissfully? Moreover, does what you don’t know even hurt you? Does it hurt the lie’s perpetrators, festering in them like a virus, or is that pain merely the burden they carry to protect Nai Nai? Even if we stick to just East against West, family against individual, duty against freedom, tradition against modernization that the film focuses on, we still have a goldmine. But Wang’s genius here is that she goes so much further in just 100 minutes.
Does what is right---not what is legal, but what is right---depend on where you are and what the others around you think is right? We ask that every time we use the Autobahn excuse for a speeding ticket. The policeman cares only what the law says. But what is the truth? How can something so morally divisive as abortion be right in some accidents of geography and not in others? How can something as final as an execution be right on one riverbank but not the opposite? If misleading someone for a crucial good can be right, what other lies can then be defended? Wang really shines in the questions that her questions can inspire.
In America the legality would have stifled the deepest of the film’s ideas, inserting instead a sort of heist element to it. In China, despite whatever Americans may think of it, the patient herself gives up her freedom of knowledge to gain another type of it: the freedom for her family to ask what is better. They do not escape the struggle over what is right.
Alex Weston’s score casts a contemplative pallor spread amongst often humorous proceedings, much as the classical choir pieces do in Manchester by the Sea. There is time to reflect, as Billi does. That further invites us to ponder the greatest of all film questions. What would we do in this situation? We feel it pulling us apart. And when we wrestle with that for the screening time and for days and weeks afterward, we have found greatness.
Four fake weddings of pinyin
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