Love Poem

We are in China. A young couple and their baby leave the city for the countryside, where their very sick grandfather lives. During the return journey, in the suffocating space of the car, transformed by the husband—who is also the director of this feature—into a film set, their relationship shatters into a thousand pieces. With the baby still in her arms, the woman threatens to ask for a divorce. A little later, still locked in the car, we discover the two same characters, now playing the roles of an adulterous husband and his mistress. The film thus takes us into an infinite game of mirrors, where we will never know how to distinguish what comes under brutal intimacy from what is staged. Like a Chinese Cassavetes, Xiaozhen Wang replays his own married life to the point of exhaustion. Love and filmmaking are interwoven here to provide us with the heart-breaking account of a couple in a ‘huis-clos’ in which it will no longer be a question of bearing witness to the real, but of asking ourselves about the limits between truth and reconstitution in our private life.

Elena López Riera