“Farewell”: Until Death Do Us Part

East and West, life and death, individualism and a sense of being part of a whole – all of this is part of “Farewell”, created “inspired by a real deception”, partly autobiographical drama directed by Lulu Wang. The combination of themes makes the film not the most obvious choice to watch, but the movie is not only for “fun” but also for “thinking”, right?

Billy is thirty, lives in Brooklyn, writes—not very well, it seems, at least she was turned down for a Guggenheim Fellowship—and is fondly attached to her grandmother. Grandmother has lived all her life in her homeland, in China, and right now she is dying of cancer, although she herself does not know about it: her relatives do not want to darken her last days with this knowledge, because “the patient dies not from cancer, but from fear of him.” And they don’t want Billy to fly to China either: the whole family gathers there under the pretext of the wedding of one of the offspring, and the girl with her non-Oriental obstinate character can ruin everything.

At first, you internally agree with her position, and you look at the situation as a whole through her eyes: a person has the right to know that his days are numbered, and dispose of the remaining time at his own discretion – and a bunch of relatives engaged in arbitrariness causes irritation. Only here they have their own truth. They, despite the long-standing move from China to the States, retained something primordial in themselves – something that Billy seems to no longer have.

“Do you want to tell [grandmother – Approx. author.] the truth, because you are afraid of the burden of responsibility for it. You will say – and you will not feel guilty. And we hide from her in order to shift the burden of experiences onto ourselves.

Her mind flutters between two worlds, each with its own rules. In none of them did she manage to become truly her own.

And Billy has to put up with this state of affairs, and silently watch how the grandmother is busy organizing her grandson’s wedding, and drinking “vitamins” prescribed on the Internet, which relatives slip, and worries about her son’s health, and does not understand that time is short, catastrophically small, and every day less and less.

Billy is angry when she sees her family fake test results, but more, it seems, because she herself cannot grieve properly: once upon a time, when she was a child, she was not told about the departure of her grandfather, and now they do not give her a proper goodbye with another loved one.

Her mind, like a bird that follows Billy in Brooklyn and here in China, flutters between two worlds, each with its own rules. In none of them did she manage to become truly her own. There, in America, Billie constantly remembers who she is and where she comes from, and once she gets to her homeland, she is forced to get to know her again: the language is forgotten, customs are alien. She, the motherland, opens up to the girl gradually, like dishes on a traditional Chinese revolving table: rice, Gongbao chicken, fried pies. Duty, tradition, family.

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