Here, There (Lu Sheng, 2010): China

Reviewed by Matilda Frid. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Lu Sheng directed this movie that focuses on the cinematography a little bit more than the actual story. He wrote the screenplay in just three months and made it on a very low budget.

We get to meet different people that are living in three different locations all over the world. The first location is in the northern parts of China. A lonely man is living in the forest taking care of the raindeers. We soon find out that his wife and son are coming to visit him. Then the story shifts to the second one, a young man that is working in a restaurant in Shanghai. His girlfriend commits suicide and he is forced to deal with it. The third story is about the owner of the restaurant’s son who has moved to Paris. He is robbed of his passport and wallet and can’t pay the rent. He befriends the landlord who is helping him retrieve his things and gets to see a new side of the old man.

Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention, but I failed to understand what this movie was really about. I felt like the three stories had no purpose and I was waiting until the credits were rolling for the movie to finally begin. If there was a deeper meaning in this film, they sure hid it well. I also thought that the stories didn’t have enough in common. It was too easy to miss that the people are related to the people in other stories. I didn’t even know that the raindeer herder was related to the young man in Shanghai until I read about it afterwards. The stories also shifted too quickly. In the beginning, I was confused since the environment in the second and third story where similar to each other.

The movie was completely undramatic, yet still had a very sad and gloomy feeling to it. When someone cries, it’s without the big background music and dramatic gestures. It’s realistic and quiet. But then it gets a little bit too realistic and too quiet. The dialogues were too slow, almost non-existing. I know that this is supposed to enhance the sadness and loneliness that we are meant to feel, but it just makes me bored.

This was simply just not my type of movie. If you like these undramatic and slow movies, I’m sure you will appreciate this too. Because if this movie is really good at something, it’s creating a mood with the grey images and lack of dialogue. I just wasn’t convinced. It felt like I wasted my time on something that didn’t give me anything at all, not even an emotion during the actual time the movie was playing. I just sat there almost completely unaffected. So if you have similar taste in movies as me, avoid this one.