You can almost tell when Wayne Wang makes films that he probably considers closer to his heart: they come in pairs. Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), was accompanied by Dim Sum Take Out, a short film made up of outtakes from the previous film. Smoke (1995), written by the novelist Paul Auster, was followed by Blue in the Face (1995), a series of improvisations based on the characters from Smoke.
His two latest films -– A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (winner of the Golden Shell for Best Film at the 2008 San Sebastian Film Festival) and The Princess of Nebraska, both from 2007 – are companion movies as well: both are based on short stories by the prize-winning Oakland-based writer Yiyun Li. They are studies in contrasting cinematic styles, as well: slow, elegant takes for A Thousand Years; smeared handheld digital cameras for the other.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers revolves around Mr. Shi, played by Henry O (winner of the Best Actor award at the San Sebastian Film Festival). The widower has arrived from Beijing to visit his daughter in Spokane, Yilan (Feihong Yu), in an attempt to help her recover from her recent divorce. His presence isn’t exactly welcome, however; he’s a little too solicitous (though no doubt engendered by protectiveness), and overly curious at the same time – understandable, because his daughter isn’t exactly forthcoming with information.
Mr. Shi spends his time, as no doubt many Asian immigrant retirees do, navigating the dislocated curiosities of American suburbia: the bus, Mormon missionaries, a man practicing his golf swing in his backyard, a woman in a bikini who spends all her time lounging by the pool. (A lesser filmmaker would have mined these situations for laughs, but the scenes have an oddly calm dignity of their own, anchored by O’s performance.) But all these are ultimately more understandable than the gulf, widened by their circuitous communication, full of silences and gaps, between father and daughter.
But perhaps the more appropriate reference points for both films are Wang’s first major films, Chan Is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum. Both mark a clear revisiting of the films at the beginning of Wang’s career arc: a looser, more episodic narrative, an interest in pared-down family relationships and what makes them operate. Dim Sum, in particular, is about a recently-widowed mother and her daughter, whom the former wants to marry off before she, too, passes on. (There’s even a same shot, of parent and daughter at the dinner table, repeated a few times in both movies; as with Dim Sum, food forms the visual third point of the triangle.)
The best scenes in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers are those that deal with incomprehension: a series of scenes when Mr. Shi attempts to converse with an elderly Persian woman (Vida Ghahremani) he meets regularly at a park. Neither can speak English well (though in Li’s short story, neither can barely speak a common language at all). But there’s something sharp and real and gently comic about their conversations – here, as in Chan Is Missing, deliberately unsubtitled – about the way they nod uncomprehendingly, too polite to tell the other of their lack of understanding. And yet they manage to communicate in more meaningful ways than father and daughter do.
The film is full of long takes, but the odd thing about them is that they are, in fact, too short; they’re edited too closely to the punch line, as it were. The piano tinkle in the background accompanies the revelatory line, then there’s a quick medium shot, then the scene ends. It’s as if Wang doesn’t trust the audience to appreciate the full import of what just preceded, and instead chooses to underline it just to make sure. (In contrast, another Ozu-inspired director like Hou Hsiao-Hsien would perhaps let the scene breathe longer, easing the viewer out of the artificiality of the temporally-bracketed scene more slowly. Indeed, in Dim Sum, Wang followed these scenes with an Ozu-like “pillow shot”: a white bed sheet, on a clothesline, waving gently in the breeze.)
But this is a minor complaint when seen in the light of the restrained simplicity of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. There’s a scene in the film – shades of Tokyo Story here – when we get wind of Yilan’s plan to buy train tickets for her father so he can travel and see more of the United States. But all he wants, he tells her later in an almost offhand way, is “to see the America you’re happy in.” It’s a quiet, stunning moment, one of many in Wang’s eloquent, finely-crafted return to form.
