In the Same Breath Review: A Blistering Tale of Two Nations’ Failed Covid Response

The film reveals a pandemic to be an inevitable comeuppance for both China and the U.S.’s respective policy failures.

In the Same Breath
Photo: HBO Documentary Films

Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath makes an elemental point with undeniable, furious lucidity: that Covid-19 ravaged China and the United States due to their respectively self-interested governments, who acted in bad faith in a bid to maintain power. While the U.S. likes to think of itself as a democracy, Wang pinpoints just how much of its social oscillations rhyme with those of an authoritarian regime, particularly in the distribution of propaganda. But there’s one ironic difference between the two countries, which Wang fervently underscores: While China clamps down on the distribution of information, punishing those who say or post anything deemed to be an inconvenient truth, the U.S. is so flooded with information and wingnut conjecture as to render social unity on any issue impossible.

In the Same Breath is both a documentary and personal essay, as Wang foregrounds her unique position to compare and contrast China and America’s response to a modern disaster. Wang was born and raised in China and still has family there, though she has lived in New York City for the last nine years. On January 23, 2020, the day that Wang returned to the States from a visit to her homeland, Wuhan went into lockdown, at which point Wang’s husband had to return to bring back their son, who was still with Wang’s mother. It’s clear from very early on that Wang has experienced Covid-19’s rise in two distinct cultures quite viscerally and at great personal peril, which she relates in plaintive voiceover throughout the film.

In the Same Breath opens on China’s celebration of the new year on January 1, 2020. The images are patriotic and stirring, at which point Wang reveals that state media later released the following message that barely registered but lingered in her mind: “On January 1st, Wuhan Police made an announcement. Eight people were punished for spreading rumors about an unknown pneumonia.” Not to be cowed by anyone, or, most of all, to appear weak to global rivals, China still held what’s now understood to be the first massive super-spreader event.

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Wang continues to highlight how Chinese news outlets, all beholden to the government, covered Covid-19’s spread even after the shutdown, voicing eerily identical platitudes. The risk of human-to-human transmission was underplayed until it was impossible to deny, after which a happy sheen was forced onto every story. Healthcare workers were rendered as heroes, though the minutiae of their ghoulish toil was elided. Sensing this disconnect between coverage and reality, Wang created a dossier of Covid-19’s destruction. She saved images of people dying and begging for help before they could be erased from online forums, and she sent camera people into hospitals to shoot footage that could get them severely punished.

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As a filmmaker, Wang utilizes a simple, devastating device, fashioning montages that fuse Chinese propaganda with footage of what’s actually happening. In some ways, In the Same Breath resembles Ai Weiwei’s Coronation, featuring similar hospital footage, yet that film was cold and intellectualized, while Wang’s film is heartbroken and hot-blooded. Certain images here are unforgettable, from a dying woman gasping for air like a stranded fish to medical workers wandering streets that are riven with road blocks, trying to find patients who are almost certainly to be deposited at an overcrowded hospital that will reject them.

In one sequence, Wang even captures a father and son debating whether to let a family member die at home or in a hospital waiting room. Meanwhile, deaths in the streets become common, with imagery that suggests a true apocalypse. Wang is purposefully, brutally repetitive, emphasizing one agonizing death after another, which the Chinese government counters with the kind of ruthlessness that the filmmaker also portrayed in One Child Nation.

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Wang’s view of America’s response to Covid-19 is no less caustic, showing how we, even with months of forewarning, made the same mistakes as China. And while Wang hits familiar targets such as Donald Trump, who unforgivably turned safety protocols into yet another issue in our bottomless and tedious culture war, she also casts a critical light on the CDC, including figures like Anthony Fauci, who’s shown claiming, early in Covid’s rise in the U.S., that masks aren’t necessary. Other healthcare workers interviewed here say such statements were issued to cover up for the country’s fundamental lack of preparation and materials. (Wang also reveals that the Washington Post and New York Times both turned her pitch for a Covid-19 article down, months before the disease became relentless news fodder.)

In the face of such disarray, in a culture that’s been conditioned to filter every issue through a hyperbolic scrim of right versus left, rivalries and bullshit intensified, in turn proliferating a containable threat. At one point in her documentary, Wang dares to empathize with never-maskers on a certain level, just as she earlier dares to admit to the appeal of the Chinese government’s simplistic propaganda. After all, it’s admittedly easy to distrust one’s government, and to even resist the sort of smug sermonizing that renders authentic points still somehow rejectable. Yet Wang also dares to show traumatized people who’ve actually dealt with Covid watching footage of mask protests. Such reactions might be potentially understandable by our lizard brains, yet they’re also selfish and self-aggrandizing, and Wang’s despair and fury over our culture’s self-annihilation reach biblical heights.

Wang reveals the Covid-19 pandemic to be an inevitable, catastrophic comeuppance for both China and the United States’s respective policy failures, and, in a final, heartbreaking flourish, the filmmaker imagines what a sensible, well-communicated response to Covid-19 might’ve looked like, which suggests nothing more or less than poignantly naïve fantasy. Which is to say that, in Wang’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.

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Score: 
 Director: Wang Nanfu  Screenwriter: Wang Nanfu  Distributor: HBO Documentary Films  Running Time: 97 min  Year: 2021

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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