The Farewell (2019): The movie that hits too close to home
Hi! For the first film review I posted on my blog, I want to
talk more about The Farewell (2019). It’s a great movie I watched back in the
first half of 2020, and it saddened me because not many people around me watch
it. I stumbled upon this movie because I saw Awkwafina as the cast, and since I
enjoyed her acting in The Crazy Rich Asians (2018) I decided to give this movie
a try.
The Farewell is a semi-autobiographical film adaptation of
director Lulu Wang’s personal journey in dealing with her grandmother’s illness.
The movie revolves around the life of Billi and her family who learn that Nai
Nai (the grandmother) has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer with the
prognosis of only months to live. Believing that breaking the news would also
break her spirit and hasten the inevitable, the family decided to keep the
diagnosis from her. At the same time, they also decided to move up the
timetable on her grandson’s wedding, giving the entire family a reason to visit
China and say goodbye.
Wang’s film is clearly a labor of love and an introspective
examination of mixed cultural identity. Awkwafina plays Billi, a fictionalized
version of the director grappling with a secrecy dictated by tradition, caught
between not only two cultures, but two generations. In an interview with Vox,
Wang states: “…Yes, the movie’s about identity, but it’s more about what
happens when you leave home. What are the values that you bring from the home
that you left, and what are the values that you leave behind? What do you
adopt? Those are questions about identity that go much, much deeper than the
color of your skin and what you look like.”
I think this movie depicts the competing demands of filial duty, individual ambition and cultural identity of Billi, as a second generation immigrants, very well. Billi is bothered by the secrecy, both because it seems unethical to withhold information from a patient and because it means that she must counterfeit her own feelings, suppressing her grief in favor of forced joy. In America, Billi is told, the emphasis is on the individual, whereas in China family and community always come first. In one exchange from the film, Billi’s uncle (Jiang Yongbo) offers some heated words when she reaches a breaking point with the family’s big lie:
“You think one’s life belongs to oneself. But that’s the difference between the East and the West. In the East, a person’s life is part of a whole.”
Another reason why I like this movie, because it just hits too close to home. In 2018, I lost my grandmother to cancer and my family decided to leave her in the dark about her illness. There’s a saying, “Cancer patient died not because of the disease, they died because of their fear.” As I watch the film, it feels as if I was there. I can feel the sadness and the heaviness of their heart as they tried to look collected and fine on the outside. It's a great movie and I think everyone should watch it at least once.
NY Times and Strange Harbors
Comments
Post a Comment