Chinese film-maker Wenqian Zhang makes her feature debut with this amazingly intimate, emotionally painful and personal film about her dysfunctional family; completed in 2022, it is only now getting its UK debut. Since then, she has completed Remains of the Hot Day, a short film (shown at the Berlin film festival) that is clearly based on the same real-life family pressures we see building up so unbearably here.
This documentary has enough characterisation and backstory for an entire 21-episode soap opera. Zhang has just returned home from study in the US and records the oppressive atmosphere at length from various fixed positions; she has set up cameras in the family home, a big apartment with small bedrooms in which people incubate their sadness and frustration.
Zhang’s father (evidently a software developer in the field of structural engineering) was away from home for about 10 years in Beijing and elsewhere during the 90s – most of Zhang’s childhood in fact – trying to strike it rich as China reached for a capitalist-commercial boom. But he has since returned, financially embarrassed, and is apparently sleeping a lot during the day – a symptom of depression. He is to be found mournfully reading aloud the sentimental letters he would write to his wife while he was away. His wife, Zhang’s mother, has experience in corporate training, and has presumably been the breadwinner; she is profoundly irritated with her husband’s feckless self-pity. In one extraordinary scene, she actually starts hitting him and Zhang has to hold her hands, just out of shot.
Zhang’s elderly and ailing grandparents live with them, another source of unease for her mother, who is also annoyed that Zhang has no plans to marry her boyfriend, Yue (who is in fact the film’s cinematographer, and may well have been filming his prospective mother-in-law’s arias of impatience). Zhang’s grandma confides in her that her mother is thinking of selling the apartment to create a proper dowry for their wedding, in addition to the huge sums she has spent on her daughter’s American education. Meanwhile, Zhang’s dad is loathed by his brother-in-law, having apparently failed to repay a loan from him, or perhaps made an inadequate contribution to some joint business venture – and the brother-in-law starts screaming at him over lunch.
You can see with horrible clarity what an unbearable burden all this is on Zhang herself: her mother wants her to make a conventional success of her life (that is, get married) to redeem the awful mess her parents have made of theirs. It is quietly devastating when her dad sits on the bed and says softly: “I never imagined my life would be such a failure … I want to see if I can catch the last train to find myself.” You need time to acclimatise to the real-time docu-slowness of this film, but it has an intense and often shocking honesty.
• A Long Journey Home is on True Story from 13 October.
