In many ways, writer-director Jing Yi’s graceful and ephemeral drama, The Botanist (Zhi Wu Xue Jia), plays out like your typical coming-of-age movie. It’s about a lonely kid, raised by his grandmother in a small town, who falls in love with a neighboring girl. But as folks begin to move away to the big city, the kid may find himself left behind.
What sets Jing’s feature debut apart from many other examples of the genre is its unique location, as well as an obsession with nature that’s underscored by its title. Set in a stunning faraway valley in northern China that lies on the border with Kazakhstan, The Botanist depicts an isolated community where the locals speak Kazakh instead of Mandarin, and where life goes on as if modern technology never existed.
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The Botanist
It’s an intriguing backdrop to a film that can be too dreamy and understated to fully captivate, with Jing more interested in atmosphere and visual splendor than sustained storytelling. Premiering in Berlin’s Generation sidebar, The Botanist could find spots at other fests and with select niche distributors, especially those catering to children who are curious to discover an unseen world.
The movie opens like an old folktale, and that tone pervades the rest of the narrative. We are seemingly in the present, where a pre-teen boy named Arsin (Yesl Jahseleh) lives alone with his grandma (Sarhet Eramazan) and spends his idle days — the story is set during the summer vacation — collecting plant specimens for his personal botany collection.
But it’s hard to tell when, exactly, the action is taking place. Out there in the northern-most corner of the Xinjiang province, life hasn’t changed much in decades. When Arsin isn’t wandering the countryside looking for rare flowers and placing them in a scrapbook, he helps his older brother (Jalen Nurdaolet) graze sheep in the surrounding hills. At night he lays quietly in bed — no iPhones or Nintendo Switches to stare at — and is carried by surreal dreams. Sometimes he sleepwalks into the forest, to the point that it’s hard to tell if what’s happening in The Botanist is actually real or more like the waking dream of a child.
That’s clearly the tone Jing is going for, employing exquisitely composed images (by Li Vanon, shooting his first feature) to capture a world where nature often seems to be taking over — cue the shot of a horse mysteriously appearing inside a plant-filled classroom — and where life can be like a fairytale, except when it gets suddenly real.
This happens whenever Arsin meets up with Meiyu (Ren Zihan), a Mandarin-speaking Chinese girl who helps out in her family’s general store, which provides the only link between the community and the rest of China. Whenever Arsin stops by the shop to buy supplies and do some very subtle flirting, we hear radio broadcasts about plans to bring natural gas mining to the region, which will no doubt transform the landscape forever.
The puppy love-romance between Arsin and Meiyu is what drives the story, but there’s not much to it beyond lots of silent camaraderie and fleeting glances. A more intriguing plotline involves Arsin’s brother, who we learn fled a manual labor job in Beijing after a violent altercation. He’s now stuck back home, passing his time texting his girlfriend in the big city, longing to break away from the country bumpkin life. At some point we learn that Meiyu, too, has a chance to escape, which would leave Arsin all by himself.
These developments don’t move the narrative needle all that much, and The Botanist feels more like a reverie than the classic coming-of-age drama it tries, at times, to be. Jing has a knack for capturing the beauty of bucolic living, especially when you’re still young like Arsin and receptive to nature’s embrace (we learn earlier that the boy has a missing uncle who was also an amateur botanist). But the world of the film can seem so ethereal — albeit attractively so — that it often risks slipping through our fingers.
