The Park

This review was originally published in Time Out Beijing, May 2008, p 64

Dir Yin Lichuan China 2007

At the outset The Park feels like another predictable, if well acted, tale of parent-child alienation and generational conflict, but this initial familiarity is misleading. Step by step Yin Lichuan's understated film evolves into a surprising and deeply moving meditation on the complexities of familial relations and the corrosive, unstoppable effect time has on people's dreams and expectations.

June is a 29-year-old TV presenter living in Kunming. A visit from her elderly widowed father finds her asleep in the arms of her boyfriend; lover-boy hightails it out the window and dad moves in, doling out constant criticism and generally disrupting June's routine. Their relationship goes from bad to worse when she does a story on the matchmaking activities of elders in a local park, and finds dad hawking her details to prospective mothers-in-law.

Despite the father's wilful interference in June's life, Yin Lichuan manages to skilfully balance viewers' sympathies across the generational divide. When June finds one of her suitors is a documentary maker who has interviewed her father about his motivations for being in the park, she demands to see the tape. Her subsequent viewing is handled beautifully by Yin in the film's quietly effecting emotional centrepiece.

The Park's restrained melancholic tone builds to a quiet tear-jerker of a final scene that wordlessly conveys an aching sense of life’s fleeting transience. Superficially a genre melodrama, this small film contains riches that only yield themselves upon multiple viewings.

Director of The Park, Yin Lichuan