With
this film, Qiu Yang became the first Chinese filmmaker to win the Cannes Palme
d’Or for best short film. Appreciative festival officials also claim he gave Cannes’
shortest acceptance speech ever: “****ing amazing.” His characters do not have
a great deal to say either, but the film is still quite eloquent. Cai Zhuo
might be stoic by nature, but she won’t sit quietly waiting for confirmation of
the grimmest news a parent can receive in Qiu’s short film, A Gentle Night (trailer here), which screens as part of Shorts Program 1 during the 55th New York Film Festival.
Cai’s
thirteen-year-old daughter Linlin never came home from school. She is not the
sort of girl to run away from home, not that the cop handling their missing
person report believes it or cares very much. He tells Cai and her less
concerned husband to come back tomorrow, when the trail is cooler, but to bring
her teacher with them. Of course, the pedagogue does not want to get involved.
Feeling desperate and depressed, Cai starts walking the streets of their
neighborhood, unsure whether it would be good or bad news if she discovers a
clue to Linlin’s fate.
Loosely
inspired by a real child disappearance in Changzhou, Gentle shares common themes with Qiu’s previous short film, Under the Sun. Both critique the “don’t
get involved, mind your own business” attitudes prevalent in a consumerist
Mainland culture increasingly divorced from traditional Chinese values. Whereas
Sun depicts the grubby, exploitative
behavior that gives rise to such sentiments, Night clearly establishes the resulting human cost.
Throughout
Night, Cai is profoundly alone, like
nobody would ever want to be. Li Shuxian’s performance might be quiet and
taciturn, but it emotionally devastating just the same. Frankly, Li does not
need many words to communicate her fundamental truth, over and over again.
As
he did in Sun, Qiu and his cinematographer
Constanze Schmitt often frame the characters at oblique angles, through open
doorways and windows. Yet, instead of distancing viewers, it heightens the
sensation of our eavesdropping on excruciatingly private moments.
