The ‘tricksy poor vs guileless rich’ subgenre has had something of a moment in recent years, from Parasite to Saltburn on the big screen to The White Lotus on the small, but, despite its popularity and obvious timeliness, it’s a risky leap to take. These stories often lend themselves to a lot of scenes of kind of just hanging about while ominous music or sounds play in the background, promising eventual calamity when the game is up. When you can’t deliver on that final promise, though, you get something aimless and patience-testing. Sadly, it’s into this category that the dreamlike but all-too-opaque debut from Jianjie Lin, Brief History of a Family, falls.
In this case, the economically unfortunate side of the equation is represented by Yan Shuo (Sun Xilun), a 15 year old kid with a shabby and abusive home life (or so he says, we never get a glimpse of his home or oft-mentioned father) who becomes semi-friendly with a richer boy from school, Tu Wei (Lin Muran). Shuo and Wei never really seem that close with each other, but Wei’s parents – biologist dad (Zu Feng) and stay-at-home mum (Guo Keyu) immediately take a liking to Shuo, the kind of smart, driven, and grateful boy that their own son has failed to grow up into.
It’s an interesting twist on the genre, the usual class tensions and slow but steady crossing of boundaries by the interloper (there’s a lot of pointed talk about how viruses invade cells) filtered through the resentment of a shitty and spoiled kid who nonetheless still wants his parents to approve of him like they do his ‘friend’. But that’s all Brief History of a Family ever manages to be; interesting on an ideas level (it’s also tackling the saviour complexes of privileged parents, the holdover effects of the one child policy and more) while the story just putters along without much punch.
Whether there is actually anything less than perfectly earnest about Shuo’s essential adoption into a new family is left ambiguous on paper, but Xilun’s placidly imposing performance certainly suggests some sort of calculation or even malice. Ultimately, there’s a lot left unanswered in a way that isn’t quite outright frustrating, but does leave things ending on a pretty weightless note. Brief History of a Family is at least shot very nicely, full of cleanly striking compositions and some eerie POV stuff, but the alienating story needed more flare to be saved from its own lack of pizzazz.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 