Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing) is a bit of a mess, and he doesn’t really care to fix that. He’s been divorced for two years and still hasn’t told his friends (who he only sees every so often anyway); his relationship with his wife dissolved because they were so mutually respectful they stopped wanting to have sex; and his elementary-age daughter Smiley lives with his sister, Gu Wenhui (Qinqin Li) and her husband, who Wentong frequently confides in at odd hours, much to the man’s exasperation. He’s also a poet turned food critic who has little reverence for his new line of work and whose previous output is dismissed by others as forgettable. You’d think Wentong would want to wrest custody back of his daughter or perhaps make a real effort at moving on from the fairly recent death of his mother — oh yeah, there’s that too — but he seems mostly content to drink a little too much, sleep too late and generally scrape by, though he isn’t a bad father when he wants to be, nor seemingly an untalented writer. Such are the nuances and modest mysteries of Zhang Lu’s film The Shadowless Tower, whose drama accumulates gradually (we collect the aforementioned details and exposition piece by piece over time). Character motivations and plot threads are left semi-unresolved and nebulously defined, but enough crystallizes that the film amounts to a moving story of a man slowly reengaging.
Zhang’s restraint at taking these plot ingredients and narrative trajectory and not making something soppy or sentimental is admirable, and allows Wentong’s travails, apathy and the progress he does achieve to all register more profoundly. He’s someone who lives in a constant zone of ambiguity; before we even get a look at him, the film opens with Smiley asking her dad if he’s “a good guy or a bad guy,” adding, “In my dream last night you were bad.” Xin threads this needle throughout, intentionally frustrating us with Wentong’s inaction and apathy while layering in his quiet charm. It’s this latter quality that attracts the friendship, or possibly more, of Ouyang Wenhui (Yao Huang), a photographer with whom he collaborates and later becomes an unlikely day trip companion and drinking buddy. Ouyang’s characterization is yet additional evidence of Zhang’s good instincts: she could easily be a manic pixie dream girl archetype, due to how this quirky woman, often clad in old-fashioned or off-kilter garb and flitting around with a bemusing attitude, could function solely to solve or ease our male main character’s ailments without occupying any real space of her own. There is some of that, but Zhang, who wrote the screenplay as well as directed The Shadowless Tower, wisely includes some scenes of Wenhui existing independently. Not only that, but these moments aren’t idealized; rather, they show how prickly and socially inept she can be, rounding her out as a person with real problems of her own.
Together, it’s a delight to watch these two weirdos get to know one another through playful insults and pointed conversation. There is a repeated focus on the finer complexities of language, words’ meanings and the public reception of one’s speech that are well realized by Zhang’s sharp screenplay. The way Wentong and Wenhui double back and reexamine each other’s phrasing or word choice and can’t let anything that’s said go will be all too relatable to a certain swathe of people of which this writer is unfortunately a member. There hasn’t been a film this concerned with language and attuned to the subtleties of how different dialects — in this case, Mandarin and Cantonese — impact social behaviors since last year’s Anatomy of a Fall.
While we’re comparing The Shadowless Tower to notable arthouse films from 2023: Zhang’s film frequently reminds of Andrew Haigh’s soft sci-fi parable of queer urban loneliness All of Us Strangers. And while, to be clear, Haigh’s film is still fairly successful in its reckonings with ghosts from the past and a lost soul trying to stay present and move forward, it’s sometimes painfully literal (not to mention mired in a deus ex machina). In Haigh’s movie, Adam (Andrew Scott) can take a train that not only takes him to the London suburb where he grew up, it transports him back several decades to visit his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) before they died in a fateful car crash. In The Shadowless Tower, things aren’t so cleanly defined, and the obliqueness Zhang is comfortable in makes his film the more potent and compelling one. In scenes set in Wentong’s seaside hometown, we’re not totally sure if it’s his father who he’s interacting with, or if he’s really spending time with an older lover; sometimes it seems as though these figures are real, and other times like a figment of his imagination. Zhang is right to give us no clarity on the matter, encouraging us to share in Wentong’s rumination and slight confusion. Time and memory are slippery beasts and The Shadowless Tower finds understated, clever ways to evoke their currents.
Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing
The post The Shadowless Tower appeared first on Spectrum Culture.