Review: The Calming Is a Chargeless Portrait of Artistic and Emotional Stasis

Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.

The Calming
Photo: Film at Lincoln Center

Obscure even by art-house standards, Chinese actress and filmmaker Song Fang’s 2012 feature-length directorial debut, Memories Look at Me, was a small structuralist marvel: an autobiographical work starring Song alongside her own parents, shot in her family home, that breaks from its initially documentary feel through a calculated juxtaposition of fictionalized sequences that alternate in tone and tempo, and provide a narrativized focus that seems somehow closer to “real” than a straight documentary on Song’s family might’ve been. Abbas Kiarostami was said to be a big fan of the film.

The meticulousness and control of Memories Look at Me gave it a specific conceptual focus. Song’s follow-up feature, The Calming, places a similar emphasis on technique, but its scrupulously shot and staged compositions tend to suck the life out of every frame. The narrative is simple, and again loosely autobiographical: Song surrogate Lin Tong (Qi Xi), a documentary filmmaker who we learn early on has recently been through a breakup, drifts between Japan, China, and Hong Kong—locations with stated sentimental value to Song, who drew on her memories of visiting them during the film festival run of Memories Look at Me.

That sense of personal meaning is meant to be conveyed through a film’s worth of immaculate long takes of Lin inhabiting different spaces, from bustling cityscapes to minimally furnished apartments, to lush, sprawling natural environments. But as a result of Song’s seeming unwillingness to give us much understanding of this character and her limited formalist vocabulary, The Calming is left unable to connect angst to anything significantly deeper.

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The best scenes here, perhaps unsurprisingly, involve Lin’s visits with her aging mother and father; the dialogue between Lin and her mother, in particular, sometimes hints at a rich shared history between them, in much the same way as similar scenes between Song and her mother did in Memories Look at Me. Even in these moments, though, the filmmaking is frustratingly chilly and unengaging—all long-take master shots with clear lineage to the Taiwanese New Wave, especially Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films. By contrast, Song (who starred in Hou’s The Flight of the Red Balloon) ably dodged direct comparisons to her influences in her more experimental debut feature by consistently doing interesting things with composition, shooting herself and her parents on direct eye lines with the camera and inserting pillow shots in a playful and self-aware act of homage to that great chronicler of filial piety, Yasujirō Ozu.

The Calming settles for nothing more than consummate professionalism. Song doesn’t appear particularly interested in grabbing our attention with striking compositions or lighting—a lack of affectation that might be more admirable if what she was doing with character had a greater depth of vision. Instead, The Calming dutifully and unilluminatingly progresses from one low-key encounter to the next. Lin gives friends and family vague updates about her personal life and career and earnestly enquires about others’ lives, only pausing for the occasional moment of self-awareness about this story’s proximity to Song’s own work. In one sequence, after a screening of her latest documentary at a festival, Lin takes a question from an audience member who wonders whether or not her film might be more appropriate to play at a museum. And Lin’s response plays like Song’s own words have been put into her mouth when she explains that she has affection for the “visual impact” of seeing her work on a big screen.

The most egregious, and profoundly basic, moment in The Calming seems almost inevitable in retrospect, considering the kind of arty, fugue state-evoking formalism that Song possibly aspires to. Early on in the film, Lin screens a recent documentary of hers for one of her colleagues, who comments, “That’s a great shot…but a slightly closer shot might be better.” And in the last third of The Calming, during a sequence in which Lin, inside a theater, listens to an opera performance that we never see, Song cuts from a master shot to a “slightly” closer medium one of Lin, tears beginning to form around her closed eyes.

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The film is very intentionally about the passive act of moving through the world and waiting for inspiration and meaning to present themselves to you. As the ending makes clear, the span of The Calming’s narrative all takes place in between film projects for Lin, and her interactions with the people whom she visits are meant to gradually push her past this period of artistic and emotional stasis. But all we’re really given as a catalyst for this personal odyssey is a casual mention of a breakup in the first 10 minutes of the film. Whereas Song’s Memories Look at Me communicates a personal narrative through dynamic craft and tonal variation, The Calming never actually finds its “slightly closer shot.” Instead, it moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping the audience at a distance.

Score: 
 Director: Song Fang  Screenwriter: Song Fang  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Sam C. Mac

Sam C. Mac is the former editor in chief of In Review Online.

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