Wang lives in America on a student visa. His Yujing has a resident work visa, but as your MAGA uncle can easily explain to you, their American-born daughter Wangwang is a U.S. citizen. Nevertheless, Wang’s parents agreed to take her back to Mainland China for several months, once his wife’s maternity leave ended. They were feeling overwhelmed and his parents were eager to help. It takes a village, right? Then the pandemic hit, canceling all flights between the United States and China.
Even when international travel revived, few flights to China were resumed. Many factors contributed to the decline of bilateral relations, most of which Wang avoids mentioning, like the draconian “National Security” Law in Hong Kong used to crush dissent and the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang. Consequently, when Wang hears Trump discuss the term “decoupling,” he decides to use it as the metaphor for his film.
Eventually, Wang finally arranges visas to bring his daughter home, but she is standoffish towards him. Presumably, most parents will feel Wang’s pain at finding himself a stranger in his daughter’s eyes. From what they see in Decoupling, viewers do not need to be child psychologists to understand how ineffective FaceTime parenting is, especially at that age. However, most parents will also wonder how in the world Wang and his wife could let things get to that point. In some ways, they sort of asked for this.
Perhaps not so ironically, some of the most poignant moments in the film focus on his mother’s relationship with her uncle (his great uncle), who clearly suffered enormously during the Cultural Revolution. (Much to his misfortune, the regime classified him as “landed Gentry,” with predictably dire results.) In fact, a previous Anti-Rightist Campaign also hit his family hard. Frankly, the affection and protectiveness Wang’s mother shows for his great-uncle suggests he might have missed the bigger story. Maybe Wang should not necessarily made himself the star of his own documentary.
From time to time, Decoupling raises interesting questions, but Wang is unwilling or unable to answer them. It certainly captures the human cost of Xi’s Covid Zero policies and the Trump/Fauci overreaction, but this short documentary, barely running over an hour, never runs very deep and solely reflects Wang’s perspective. Nevertheless, this is a much more positive review than the one the future thirteen-year-old Wangwang is going to give it. Recommended mostly as a supplement viewed in conjunction with other, better documentaries on related subjects, Decoupling is available through August 11, as a selection of this year’s AAIFF.
