So Long, My Son review – a profound study of grief and forgiveness

So Long, My Son starts as it means to go on, finding a small, heartbreakingly intimate moment within a truly vast landscape. Xiaoshuai Wang’s latest film covers decades of tumultuous Chinese history, but never sacrifices its focus on the minutiae of family and grief in favour of dry politicking or grand, sweeping statements. It centres on an ordinary family, rocked by tragedies both random and government-inflicted. Relatively happy couple Yaojun (Jingchun Wang) and Liyun (Mei Yong) find their world shattered after their eight-year-old son drowns while playing in a reservoir, a misery compounded by the fact that Communist Party zealot Haiyan (Liya Ai) had earlier forced Liyun to unwillingly abort her second pregnancy.

So Long, My Son flits back and forth through time without warning, a technique that initially proves slightly confusing but eventually becomes intuitive and deeply moving as we catch snapshots of familial bliss nestled between scenes of numbed self-hatred and shock-induced stasis. Both leads give exceptional performances, especially in the present-day sequences as Yaojun and Liyun begin to find a kind of peace with their son’s death by letting go of any blame. There is such power in their forgiveness of themselves, each other, and the family of the boy who survived the fateful reservoir trip that even their most mundane rituals are gripping.

A state of grace like this is incredibly hard to portray on film at all, let alone make interesting, and it’s a huge testament to the actors and Xiaoshuai Wang’s subtly profound script and unfussy direction that So Long, My Son’s third act is so compelling. Stylistically, the film rarely draws too much attention to its craft, but the little details absolutely sing. The makeup and hair work deserves enormous praise, ageing and youthifying the cast with incredible efficiency, yet without distracting prosthetics, whilst the incidental details in the set design are together utterly transporting.

At over three hours long, So Long, My Son is hardly a light commitment, and you feel those hours more than in, say, Scorsese’s recent epic The Irishman, but it’s time well spent. You sink into this world and its story, and in allowing so much time to the study of grief and forgiveness these feelings become all the more real and affecting in both their specificity to this one family and also in a more universal sense. There aren’t many films that you can legitimately take life lessons from, but Yaojun and Liyun’s openly emotional perseverance through devastation is a life choice to be emulated.

It’s not all perfect; a subplot with Yaojun and Liyun’s neglected and rebellious adopted teenage son feels a little half-baked, as does the repeated use of “Auld Lang Syne” in the film’s first third, a motif that simply disappears without fully satisfying. But these are hardly deal-breakers (especially as the rest of the music is so wonderful and sparingly used) in a film so gentle and so finely attuned to the emotional turning points, large and small, that push us through life.

★★★★☆

By: Jack Blackwell

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