The Atlantic

Can a Film Be a Love Letter to a Country?

New movies from the writer-directors Lulu Wang and Diana Peralta explore complex questions about national belonging and communal responsibility.
Source: Courtesy of 'De Lo Mio'

For Lulu Wang, the Chinese American writer-director of the , returning to the country of her birth has often felt akin to time travel. “Whenever I would go back to Changchun in the past, I would be relegated to a child,” she in New York and Los Angeles. “You regress … This time, going back to shoot the movie, I went back as an adult.”tells the story of a young Chinese American woman named Billi (played with remarkable depth by Awkwafina). An avatar of Wang herself, Billi takes an impromptu trip to China after learning that her , or paternal grandmother (Shuzhen Zhao), had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer—and was filmed largely in Changchun, and Wang approaches the setting with a warm eye: The movie incorporates numerous panoramic shots of the city, the effect at once absorbing and disorienting. In its depiction of Billi’s attempts to reconnect with her family—chiefly Nai Nai—amid a slow-unfolding grief, raises complex questions about the elasticity of national belonging and the familial responsibilities that transcend distance. One heated dinner scene, for example, finds a relative accusing Billi’s dad (played by Tzi Ma) and her uncle (Jiang Yongbo) of neglecting their duties as sons while living in the United States and Japan, respectively: “Have you considered your mother growing old without her kids around?” she asks, the brothers’ guilt hanging in the air long afterward. weaves these small indictments throughout its run, at turns implicating Billi herself in the abandonment of her family back home.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Private Equity Has Its Eyes on the Child-Care Industry
Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on February 22, 2024. Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care s
The Atlantic5 min readSocial History
The Pro-life Movement’s Not-So-Secret Plan for Trump
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he regards his party’s position on reproductive rights as a political liability. He blamed the “abortion issue” for his part
The Atlantic4 min readAmerican Government
How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t
Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking

Related