Warm Spring Waters explores the guiding spirits of modern China – Francesco Boille

A sumptuous party in honor of an old woman, a grandmother, who seems to come from ancient China, opens an intense and delicate film, a masterpiece that enlightens us on modern China.

Debut feature film by Gu Xiaogang who also wrote the screenplay, Warm spring waters, discovered in Cannes in 2019 as the closing film of the semaine de la critique, was nominated by the Cahiers du Cinéma as the best first film of 2020, ranking seventh in the overall ranking. This is the first chapter of a trilogy which, narrating a family saga, gives rise to a powerful and enthralling fresco both intimate and collective of a precise historical moment – that of the 2008 Olympics which caused a shock in Fuyang, the city where he was born. the director – told with finesse and skill through a multitude of characters where the boundaries between novel and autobiography, or family biography, are canceled.

Because it is not an autobiography proper, but not even a novel of pure invention. Rather a fiction in which both autobiographical and fictional elements enter, fused with real stories of other people. Played magnificently by family and friends, each character is described with love and precision within the general framework that tells of an immense upheaval, urban, cultural even in social and human relations, reaching – in the discourse on liberalism that devours the country – the work of the master of contemporary Chinese cinema Jia Zhang-ke, but without ever mimicking it. We also think of the first family films of one of the greatest directors of memory of the last forty years, if not even more, the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Inspired by two important Chinese paintings, including the famous six-meter long scroll of the same name by the painter Huang Gongwang of the Yuan dynasty (Inhabit
in the mountains of Fuchun), and another that sees among its main themes the river or the quiet of the coast, this film is of a rare sweetness in narrating the cruelty of society and the obsession with money. He follows the seasons of life like those of nature, he achieves an impressive osmosis between excellent script and high direction, making use of (multiple) Bazinian sequence shots as if they were an ancient brush thus revealing, perhaps along the course of a river, new characters and new situations and, above all, what for the young director is the real protagonist: time.

André Bazin, the great critic and theorist of cinema co-founder of the Cahiers du Cinéma, a moral figure of thought on cinema who indicated neorealism as a key moment in twentieth century cinema, in fact placed at the center of his reflection on the cinematographic medium as the main language of recording of reality the procedure of the sequence shot, which consists in letting the camera resume the surrounding reality, of varying duration, without interruptions on other frames (close-ups, panoramas, etc.).

In documenting the tumultuous changes of the city and its region, both urban and landscape as a whole, through the prism of an upset of the family balance, Gu Xiaogang offers an extraordinary florilege (it is the right word for this film where nature is central) of the possibilities offered by the sequence shot. Whether the room proceeds straight from behind or sideways, as in the long marvelous sequences where you resume walking along the Fuchun river telling mythical and ancient stories, or from above with an oblique movement of the room, which rises and falls, which fluctuates, interrupting his delicate and skilful flight only after a long time, he masterfully cancels the boundaries between documentary and artificial construction of fiction because he paints them without exhibiting “pictoriality” in the photographic construction of the image.

And in doing so, it allows you to take a leap forward to much of the best contemporary cinema that has long been questioning the boundary between documentary and fiction, particularly true for Far Eastern cinema (such as that of Jia Zhang-ke).

The return of the soul
The rolls of paint, which, as Gu Xiaogang himself points out, contained an incredible amount of landscape details and characters from all walks of life, were gradually unrolled. In the same way, the director unrolls his sequence shots where the camera captures reality with unique grace. In recounting a multitude of family micro-episodes and the generational differences in the recent history of China, or in recording difficult and traumatic situations, immersing them in poetry and lightness, however, the director is always imbued with a humanistic gaze: if the birth of a young couple, who she suffers the hostility of the family (except for her now ill grandmother), she is represented in a particularly positive way, the selfishness of others, which risk being murderers, never ceases to dissolve in the human dimension, which despite everything always emerges from the waters of time and finally prevails.

“The return of the soul. That soul wanders the world. But don’t worry it’s not in danger. Souls communicate. Parents think of children, children of parents, ”says a reader of yin and yang signs. And in fact everyone seems aware of it, as when the wife of one of the brothers says to the worker son “I live for you, you for me. Every family should be united and happy ”. The obsession for material things never completely erases something higher and deeper precisely in the human dimension and which in the film regularly resurfaces in conversations and behaviors cohabiting, and often struggling, with what is less noble. In this sense we are far from so much Western cinema that at times it takes too much pleasure in photographing the cynicism of contemporary civilization and ends up mirroring it. And precisely for this reason, at the end of the cycle of the seasons, after ancient balances have been broken causing severe consequences, new balances are created with difficulty and painfully constructed.

There is a lot of talk about the cost of housing, of living. Life is not easy in this modern China, alienated from the neurosis of well-being, enrichment, status. There are those who live in boats along the river, like the fisher brother, and can give very limited help to the rest of the family. And there are those who have a child who suffers from mental illness and does not know how to pay for treatment. And finally there are nature, landscapes, water that flows from the millenary movement. Whether it is a secular nature, such as the camphor tree, three hundred years old and which returns several times, or artificial and representative of the new residential areas with skyscrapers, these are oases of spiritual green coming from another temporality, from another world. The old neighborhood, the old houses where he grew up, will be demolished, in the name of the new, of growth. Once prevalent, now the natural landscape is almost a gentle intruder, a ghost, an emanation of ancient times.

Instead, memory is important, otherwise you don’t know where you come from and where you are going and for this reason we speak of ancient paintings such as A thousand miles along the Eastern Blue River. The first is in three scrolls, kept by the Fuyang Landscape Museum. The main subject is the Fuchun River, the customs and culture of that time. The other two scrolls are probably found in a Hangzhou temple.

A film of landscapes that in turn frame sections of life in China following a family in its chorality, in its continuum, in its flow, which here also corresponds to the flow of water, generator of life, to the flow of time and to the flow cinematic as if they were one, to rediscover the inner spirit, the lost spirits, the wandering souls.