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IFFR 2022 Compétition Tiger

Critique : Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

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- Ce documentaire animé par Lei Lei, qui couvre vingt ans d’histoire chinoise, suit une famille du district de Ningdu dont les existences sont brutalement séparées par le système

Critique : Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

Cet article est disponible en anglais.

It’s a world made of propaganda images, surrealistic collages and pop-art animation, occasionally interspersed with pictures of the sky, that we find in Lei Lei’s second feature, Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish [+lire aussi :
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. The 104-minute journey, presented in the Tiger Competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, covers the past of the Chinese director’s family and their struggle to live through the country’s tumultuous political movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

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It’s a story worth telling, and a very painful one, at that. The director’s grandfather and a former bank executive, Lei Ting, is forcibly sent to the countryside while his son Lei Jiaqi (Lei Lei’s father) stays behind with his two sisters and sick mother. After some time, Jiaqi’s mother passes away, and the three children end up in an orphanage, while Ting is “re-educated” and accused of treason. It’s the tragedy of a family forced to split. The only option they have left if they want to communicate is to write letters to each other, hoping that one day they will be able to reunite.

Visually speaking, Lei Lei’s aesthetic choices predominantly veer towards experimentalism. The mix between real photographs and clay figures portraying the characters, and the juxtaposition of black and white with more “psychedelic” shades, for example, are simple solutions but are definitely well crafted. However, experimentation, sadly, is not enough to make this effort compelling. In his attempt to construct a metaphor about the oppressive system that they were living in, Lei Lei transforms Jiaqi and his sisters into birds, with Ting – depicted as half-bird, half-man – also able to fly. On the one hand, the clay figures and faces are sufficient to adequately portray the events that occurred; on the other, the material’s limited manipulability is evident when it comes to displaying or eliciting emotions, and it therefore has the effect of preventing the viewer from identifying or empathising with the characters’ vicissitudes.

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish has the potential to be a touching tale and an insightful piece, capable of offering new takes on living in China during those turbulent years, mainly unknown to Western audiences. Nevertheless, the storytelling mode adopted by the helmer struggles to keep the viewer hooked. In particular, the voice-over narration – made up of audio interviews that Lei Lei has conducted with his father Lei Jiaqi and grandfather Lei Ting over the last ten years – is conducted in a plain, almost mumbled tone, meaning that the whole atmosphere and viewing experience are drenched in a sort of perennial calm, contemplative mood. This low-key stillness may work for some sequences – perhaps during the initial set-up or within a few emotional scenes – but largely serves to prevent the audience from engaging with the movie in the long run. The presence of long silences and a minimalistic score contribute to overly dragging down its pacing. All things considered, it’s a missed opportunity, since the core of this film – a one-of-a-kind family journey, enriched by the grandfather and father’s direct testimonies – could have offered good food for thought.

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish is a US-Dutch co-production staged by See-Ray Studio, Submarine Film and Chinese Shadows. Periscoop Film is in charge of its Dutch distribution, whilst Asian Shadows has been entrusted with its world sales.

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(Traduit de l'anglais)

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