Documentarian Wang Bing has earned serious credibility in arthouse circles with his intimate, perceptive portraits of contemporary Chinese life. The filmmaker is probably best known for 2003’s “Tie Xi Qiu: West of the Tracks,” a nine-hour opus that has rightfully earned its place alongside “Shoah,” “Berlin Alexanderplatz” and “Out 1” in cinema’s endurance test hall of fame. By comparison, Wang’s most recent effort “Mrs. Fang” — awarded the prestigious Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in August —is practically a short-subject film, running a scant 86 minutes. Screening at TIFF in the Wavelengths strand, “Mrs. Fang” is apt to try the patience of audiences with its narrow scope and slow pacing, serving at best as an amuse-bouche for a larger body of work.
Mrs. Fang is Fang Xiuying, an elderly woman living in the small village of Huzhou in China’s Zhejiang province. The film, taking place over 2015 and 2016, is ostensibly a record of her protracted death as she suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Fang is only mobile for the first few shots, which orients her life of Huzhou; for the remainder of the film, she is bedridden and borderline catatonic. Unable to afford the expensive palliative care required for an Alzheimer’s patient, son Guoquang and daughter Xiaoying, as well as the extended family, do their best to make her comfortable. Unsettlingly, Fang is regularly treated as an intimate fixture in the domestic space, with the various relatives discussing her funeral plans in her presence.
Wang clearly knows how to seize upon a banal image and transform it into something unshakeably affective. The repeated close-ups of Fang’s face — a composition introduced early in “Mrs. Fang” — are searingly effective, drawing attention to the woman’s skeletal appearance, her teeth jutting out of an always open mouth. Regularly, the family members grasp at evidence of her ailing or improving health based on the smallest body movements or a perceived changed in pallor or temperature. These long takes, set to the background conversations of Fang’s extended clan, inevitably lead us to search her face for similar signs. Was that twitch meaningful? Is that a tear forming, perhaps a sign of cognizance and a response to the morbidity of her circumstances? If the shot lasts long enough. Fang is ultimately a cipher for her family, and the film’s spectator, to project onto.
“Mrs. Fang” does move outside of the bedroom, however, primarily for equally long shots and sequences of the male family members fishing during the night. These asides lend a restless quality to the film: it seems as if everyone is in a constant state of anxiety from the anticipation of Fang’s passing. However, besides contributing color to Wang’s portraiture of life in Huzhou, these repetitive fishing passages feel like padding to build out a short subject into a greater one. The men catching the prey with electric rods (the dubious ethics of which make this somewhat queasy to watch) fails to take on a lasting symbolic resonance with Fang’s death rattle. If anything, the more curious beats in this B-plot — the battery in the boat leaking acid, the men rolling up their T-shirts like crop-tops to alleviate the omnipresent heat — could be seeds of another film project.
At this point, Wang’s style as a documentary filmmaker should be pretty evident: long takes, unsensational subject matter and unobtrusive camera work. The sound design of “Mrs. Fang” is particularly articulate, most notably in the domicile sequences. The chatter amongst Fang’s relatives is ceaseless, often serving as a distraction from the visual composition (constant to the point where some of the dialogue isn’t captured in the subtitles). In one instance of the aforementioned close-ups of Fang, the off-screen banter is such a dominating distraction that the shifting camera position catches the viewer off-guard. In perhaps the most moving moment in the film, Fang reaches out to take Xiaoying’s hand, the shot settling on a close-up of the daughter’s uncertain face. Wang doesn’t resort to sentimental devices like a musical score or a faded soundtrack to highlight the gesture, its importance merely what we and Xiaoying choose to imbue it with.
Considering Locarno jury president Olivier Assayas’ past life as a film critic specializing in Chinese cinema, it was a safe bet that “Mrs. Fang” would leave that festival with some hardware. It’s difficult, however, to recognize Wang’s film as a major feature achievement, the agonized death of its subject struggling to substantiate even a 90-minute run time. Even as someone who has lost a grandparent to Alzheimer’s it is difficult to connect with Fang’s stage of the illness, so advanced and paralyzing so as to be barely recognizable as dementia. Wang is inarguably a formidable documentary filmmaker, but “Mrs. Fang,” for all its craft, has the staying power of Fang herself—only to be remembered, no matter how deeply, by a few. [C+]
Click here for our complete coverage from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival
