It’s only at the end of this slow, quiet Chinese drama that you realise the significance of the title. I won’t explain it here, it’s something worth finding out for yourself. It takes a while for this film to reveal itself. You follow an older widow, Deng, as she leads a solitary life in urban Beijing. She turns up at her sons’ houses unannounced to cook them food, much to their annoyance and the chagrin of one daughter-in-law. She visits her aged mother in a nursing home. The sense is that she is pragmatic, maybe something of a martyr. She talks to her dead husband. Sometimes we see him there too, listening in silence. There is a thread here about generations and the obligations of child to parent, so intrinsic once but now changing.  Continue reading →