Director – Jianjie Lin – 2024 – China – Cert. 15 – 99m
****
A boy from a broken home starts spending more and more time with the family of a schoolmate, where the family isn’t quite as perfect as it initially appears… – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st
A boy is doing pull-ups in the school gym. A basketball hits him on the head. He falls. (All in one highly striking shot looking from behind at the back of his head.) He’s on the floor. A nurse patches him up in the san. Going home, he has a minor altercation with a boy who surprises him. But, actually, the boy just wants to know if he’s okay.
Next day, the same boy – driven by guilt, perhaps? – gives him a ride over to his own house on his bicycle. It’s a nicer place than the first boy is used to: the calming sound of bubbles through water can be heard from the fish tank; the whole place seems light, airy, pleasant. The other boy’s choice of music stands in sharp contrast to this – he listens to rap. The pair play videogames until his parents, Mr. & Mrs. Tu (Zu Feng & Guo Keyu), invite him to stay for supper. He laps up the food, explaining that his mum is dead, and his dad is not much of a cook. The father of the first boy, Yan Shuo (Xilun Sun) phones, and he has to return home, explaining, “my dad is drunk again”.
Shuo becomes an increasingly frequent visitor at the Tus’. Playing the other at a coin game, he realises he’s being set up to lose and asks if the other was the person who threw the ball at his head. The flat becomes a second home to Shuo, who wanders around it to the accompaniment of classical arpeggios, and lies on a bed absorbing the contents of self-help tapes. He starts talking to the boy’s parents – to the mum about her favourite fruit, to the dad about the joys of studying, something their own son, Wei (Muran Lin from Detective Chinatown, Chen Sigheng, 2015) isn’t too good at. In fact, Wei doesn’t see why he should study.
There’s nothing Wei would like more than to get into the school fencing team and compete in the championship. Only his parents don’t see that as a viable eduction.
The husband works wearing a white lab coat in a high-tech building, lecturing about antidotes to the Coronavirus.
Slowly, the lives of the visiting boy and the family become more and more enmeshed. The parents enrol their son into a cramming school, but Wei gets Shuo to do most of his homework, bunking off Saturdays to do fencing practice while Shuo attends the cramming using Wei’s identity, which only comes to light when Wei’s exam results prove much better than expected.
As the tension in the Tu family, now with a second son adopted all but name, increases, so too does the (unseen on the screen) tension between Shuo and his real father at home. There is a sense that Shuo, starved of parental love, is attempting to steal Wei’s parents’ love for himself as he increasingly bonds with them. The two boys are like chalk and cheese, sharing a room, with Shuo wanting the light on so he can read and Wei turning it off repeatedly so he can sleep.
There’s something engrossing about all this as it plays out as what is, to all intents and purposes, a fascinating essay on the perils of sibling rivalry.
Brief History of a Family is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 21st.
Trailer: