LGM Film Club, Part 439: The Shadowless Tower

Some of you might not be watching football, so here’s a different topic that I know moves the LGM commentariat–contemporary Chinese film. And nope. you ain’t getting an open thread. You are getting a Chinese film thread.

Zhang Lu’s largely lovely new film focuses on two people best described as lonely but functional. The main character (Bai Qing Xin) is a divorced food critic in his 40s whose father was kicked out of the house after a convicted for molesting a woman on a train three decades out of the house. Meanwhile he is now a bad father himself, a good guy who tries, but who has handed his daughter off to his kind of mean but highly functional sister to raise. He drinks too much, lives in a terrible box, and kind of floats through life like a graduate student in his 10th year in the program. He is assigned a new photographer for his reviews, a young woman (Yao Huang) about 25 years old who is hip as fuck and fun but is also pretty obviously a mess. They become friends. Meanwhile, Bai’s father (the long time Chinese director Zhuangzhuang Tian) comes back into his life.

This is one of the those gentle character studies that drive those who think movies should have a lot of explosions crazy. But as I find humans endlessly entertaining, I thought this very well acted film to be pretty good. This is about messed up families, about the sorrow of destroyed childhood in people who manage to get along anyway, about how drinking gets people through. My one critique is that it’s a bit long and it could be cut by about 3 scenes and would lose nothing. But it’s a worthy film and should compete at the bottom end of my top 10 films of 2024 once I see enough to make a legit list, or at least be in the honorable mention.

….Also, speaking of film, pour out a glass of a good Spanish red for Marisa Paredes, who was so memorable in so many Almovodar films over the year. RIP.