Review - So Long, My Song (地久天长) (2019)

DATES ON POSTER WRONG!!!! 
SHOULD BE THE MONTH OF OCTOBER 2019!!! 

"So Long, My Son" could well be called "So Long this Movie", as you would have had 3 hours taken away from your life if you had watched it. It is something the producer and director Wang Xiaoshuai ought to reflect on. 

There are numerous extraneous scenes that could have easily landed on the editing room cutting floor and had it reduced to a 90-minute film. There are also numerous confusing scene flashbacks that are swapped in-and-out among three time zones within the story. I think if the editor had wanted to confuse the audience and then call it art, then he would have certainly succeeded.

While the film has interesting content, the tensions are not built up gradually into a climax, but instead they go through a repeating saw-toothed up-and-down journey on a relatively flat plain. This makes it quite a drag at times.

The film won the Silver Bear (Best Actor & Best Actress) awards in the 69th Berlin International Film Festival this year.Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei definitely deserve the award, as they fleshed out their characters brilliantly. Their characters go through a series of excruciating grief - the grief of losing their son, of losing friends, of finding them back, of living through the changing political climates in China,...etc.

In all, it is a film worth catching if you do not mind killing 3 hours away. In the era of Youtube and Netflix, I suspect this will not go down well with the majority of people.

I watched it at the Asian Film Archive's Oldham Theatre.

If you are interested to catch it, click here


SO LONG MY SON by Wang Xiaoshuai (Singapore Trailer) from Anticipate Pictures on Vimeo.