The striking and varied landscapes and cityscapes of China provide an ample aesthetic backdrop for Peng Sanyuan's Lost and Love, a story which exhibits proclivities towards a saccharine story and sentimentality while it provides ruminations on loss, grief, and the paternal bond between father and son. Providing insight to an aspect of reality in modern day China I myself was unfamiliar with - prevalence of child trafficking - the emotional fulcrum of the story is centered around the relationship which evolves between a persistent father looking for his lost son and a young, bike mechanic he meets along his journey, who himself was a victim of child trafficking. Coming from different perspective of the same experience inevitably provides mutual aid to both of their damaged psyches; the evolving bond they share grapples with grief, loss, identity as they find a semblance of fulfillment in each other. The labyrinths of memory, the deceitful aspects it can place on an individual dealing with a crude cocktail of desperation and hope, are exhibited through this relationship, and in Lost and Love best moments, ones which don't aim for cheap payoffs, the film offers incisive commentary on the powerful effect love can have on our ontological fortitude, though by-and-large, the film's narrative proclivities are rooted in saccharine notions of a satisfactory conclusion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|