The Shadowless Tower Review: Zhang Lu’s Wistful Drama About Transcending Alienation

The title of writer-director Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower refers to the Miaoying Temple, whose pagoda, built in Beijing in 1279, offers little to no shade thanks to its unique design. Throughout the film, the pagoda looms large over characters but is often placed far enough in the background to feel almost invisible, a paradox reflected in Gu Wentong (Xin Balqing), a divorced father whose life has settled into a dispassionate existence.

Having just lost his mother, Wentong is goaded out of his dull routine of work and care for his young daughter when his brother-in-law, Li Jun (Wang Hongwei), informs him of the whereabouts of the man’s long-estranged father, Yunlai. Jun’s nervous plea to not tell Wentong’s sister (Li Qinqin) about his contact with the man hints at a dark family history that nonetheless doesn’t stop Wentong from attempting to re-establish ties with his father.

Wentong does, though, take cautious steps toward this journey. To keep his cell number private, he uses a payphone to call a number that Jun gives him, and he regularly suspends efforts to track down Yunlai. Often, he allows himself to be distracted by an unlikely companion: Ouyang Wenhui (Hung Yao), a young photographer he meets in the course of his work as a food critic.

Wenhui is the demonstrative, puckish foil to Wentong’s muted reserve. She regularly teases the older man, posing as either his girlfriend or daughter in public situations based on whichever will make him more uncomfortable in that moment. Despite their opposite personalities, the pair bond over a shared sense of alienation from their surroundings.

The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads. The locations around Beijing are a jumble of eras, as when Wenhui tours an apartment complex with a traditional layout of a spacious courtyard and classical Chinese architectural flourishes, only for she and Wentong to step outside and be confronted with the bland, utilitarian design of communist-era city planning as dull concrete walls line old, narrow streets choked with cars.

There are also copious signs of China’s rapid ascendancy as a consumerist economic superpower, with sleek office buildings and enticing neon lights clashing with the older buildings around them. And, of course, there’s the shadowless tower itself, a structure older than Tamerlane that nonetheless seems modern in its unorthodox design.

Zhang, who was an established novelist before pursuing filmmaking, handles the parallels between the characters’ out-of-time-ness and the cultural confusion of an evolving state with literary finesse. Moments of contemplative silence between Wentong and Wenhui take the place of what might have been internal monologues or omniscient third-person narration on the page, letting the nonverbal gestures speak to the film’s ideas. The two main characters are often framed in doorframes and windows, or reflected in mirrors—subtle indications of how they always feel on the precipice of performing an action that never fully takes place.

The uncommon depth of Zhang’s approach extends to the story of Wentong’s father and the reason for his separation from his family. Wentong confides to his companion about a rumored sexual indiscretion by his father that his mother accepted immediately, if rancorously, and by the time the possibility of the man’s innocence arose, both ex-wife and daughter were too set against him to consider it. And Zhang adds a metatextual social commentary to this by casting Tian Zhuangzhuang as Yunlai. One of the most noteworthy of the Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers, Tian faced government censorship after his first few, politically charged films, and even an eventual cooperation with the state never resuscitated his career.

Tian plays Yunlai with a resignation to a past that cannot be changed and a quiet commitment to salvaging a future that feel, in their own way, as strident and impassioned as the filmmaking work that derailed his once-bright career. The Shadowless Tower spends much of its 140-minute neck-deep in ennui, but the tentative efforts at rapprochement between a father and son belatedly justify the inviting warmth of Piao Songri’s cinematography as an undercurrent of hope that refuses to accept alienation as a permanent condition of contemporary life.