The Farewell

Or: Lies of Love

There’s an argument to be made in filmmaking, that if you can see the director’s craft, they’ve failed. That artistry should be like archeology; uncovering the beauty of a shot or an expression without showing the slightest sign of how it was excavated. Lulu Wang does not follow that rule, but her semi-demi-hemi personal story, The Farewell, would be much poorer if you weren’t aware of her over your shoulder.

Billi (Awkwafina) a young woman trying and failing to live an artists’s life in New York City, receives the news that her Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) back in Changchun, China is dying. But Nainai does not, cannot, must not know. She thinks her test results are “benign shadows,” and that the rest of the family is converging from around the world to celebrate the, very sudden, marriage of Bili’s cousin. Considered too American to subvert her true feelings for the good of the family, Bili is left behind but crashes the wedding preparations, intent on saying goodbye to her beloved grandmother.

Wang’s camera is a wary one, loitering in doorways, peaking in from hallways. Shifting around the table trying to judge which of the assembled family is going to crack under the intense pressure. It begins to loosen at the surreal, joy of the faux-wedding before finally, like its heroine learning to breathe, in the final few scenes. The writing by contract is sharp, edged, leaning into its lies so that no one in the family is entirely certain if they’re being told the straight truth. It’s dryly funny, it’s humor unforced, stoop shouldered and even heeled, though sometimes it crumples into heartbreak.

Awkwafina dots the i with her wry sorrow. Even before the news comes in she’s beat down, lying to her family with the little squirts of conversational untruths that keeps everything running smoothly.

She’s defeated before she even begins; we see, rather than be told, the expense and the stress of coming to China at all, let alone participate in the charade, is a huge leap for her. She holds the gyroscope of the movie in her hands, from dully taking dictation from her uncle, to glimpses into the odd kaleidoscope of the world she left behind, to a beautifully shot brush with the supernatural.

The rubix cube of whether it’s morally upright to keep someone in the dark for their own good, gets turned around but never solved. The Farewell is the revelation of a private grief, but one that all of us have to settle with: the knowledge that the people we love will leave us one day, and we can never get back their time, or resurrect their love. But it does it without histrionics or sweeping gestures, and seeks, in its own way, to tell the truth.