Like a vast 19th-century landscape painting of farmers toiling under the sun, with hundreds of details evoking a world of strife, sorrow and occasional jubilation, director Huo Meng’s Living the Land (Sheng Xi Zhi Di) immerses the viewer in a remote Chinese agricultural community with all the precision and beauty of an accomplished artist.
Skillfully woven and shot over several seasons, this sweeping family chronicle is set in 1991, a time when major reforms were transforming China from a nation of rural laborers into the industrial powerhouse it still is today. Caught amid the changing tides is a young boy named Xu Chuang (Wang Shang), who’s been sent to live with relatives in the countryside while his parents make ends meet elsewhere. He becomes our entry point to a place where centuries of tradition are being slowly overhauled by the modern age, forcing people to adapt as they try and hang on to their roots.
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Living the Land
Opening with an exhumation and a funeral, then closing with a wedding and several more funerals, Living the Land (which could definitely use a better English-language title) is less driven by typical movie plot mechanics than by life’s major events, which ensnare the characters and carry them towards the future — whether they want to go there or not. Running 132 minutes, it’s not an easy sell for impatient audiences or platform surfers, but those willing to let this intricate film work its magic will find themselves rewarded.
From its very first scene, in which 10-year-old Chuang quietly observes as the remains of his long-dead great uncle are unearthed from the mud, we know we’re in the hands of a skillful filmmaker. Working with cinematographer Guo Daming (Paths of the Soul), Huo stages that and many other sequences in roving long takes, allowing the action to play out in its entirety and framing the characters against the surrounding village and fields.
It takes some time to suss things out, but we soon learn that Chuang has been living since birth in his mother’s native village — far away from his own parents, who are only able to visit him once or twice a year. He’s been raised there by his young Auntie Xiuying (Zhang Chuwen), his trash-talking, chain-smoking great grandma Li (Zhang Yanrong) and other relatives who work collectively as wheat farmers for meager returns. With no telephones, automobiles, or modern equipment, they remain all but cut off from the rest of the world — at some point, a news report reminds us that the Gulf War is currently going on — employing agricultural methods that have gone unaltered from generation to generation.
Life is harsh and death can come without warning, as evidenced by an early funeral for a great aunt who missed a major operation because the family still follows the lunar calendar. And yet Huo’s portrait of rural strife is far from the kind of miserable poverty porn one expects from such a story. There is much joy for Chuang in life’s small pleasures, whether it’s reading books given to him by his teacher (Chuang is the only literate person in his family), getting spoiled by his auntie or palling around with his mentally disabled cousin, Jihua (Zhou Haotian), who’s treated with a mix of warmth and utter cruelty.
What emerges is a richly detailed fresco reminiscent of a classic pastoral novel — think Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather or D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers — where life’s many hardships come and go with each new season, and where technology arrives without warning to change things forever. The scene of village children watching a TV program of government propaganda for the first time, or of a small tractor plowing fields that for years were worked by oxen, reveal to what extent Chuang is witnessing the end of an era — a theme underlined by the pair of deaths that close out the movie.
Huo also demonstrates how, even in the farthest reaches of the land, the Chinese Communist Party holds absolute sway over the people. Officials come around every so often to collect taxes and lay down the law, and they’re welcomed like royalty by the villagers. When Chuang’s other aunt becomes pregnant with a third child — a crime punishable by a hefty fine and male sterilization — Auntie Xiuying steps in to marry the son of a CCP bigwig, sacrificing herself so she can save the family. Her wedding is a boisterous, drunken affair that leaves her looking traumatized, with dozens of rowdy men pushing her into the hands of a groom she clearly despises.
That and other memorable sequences in Living the Land prove that Huo is a master at embedding the drama within a bigger fresco of social and economic transformation. In that sense, his new film most recalls the work of Taiwanese auteurs Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose subtle, slow-burn epics were set within a homeland that constantly being shaken up by historical events. If Huo keeps on such a track, he may one day join their ranks as a director with the same ambitious scope, and the talent to match it.
