The most moving scene in “The First Taste of Loneliness” is not, in fact, its most tear-streaked. Gu You‘s heartfelt family portrait opens on an extended, anguished scene of three women — a mother, her daughter and her granddaughter — keeping vigil at the bedside of their beloved husband, father and grandfather as his longtime battle with pancreatic cancer comes to a close. Emotions run high and loud; the camera peers closely into their grief. But it’s a quieter, more composed moment a little later that really jabs at the heart. A short time after her father’s death, Yue (Zhou Xun) opens the final jar of his famous homemade pickles, tastes them, and with the bittersweet knowledge that she’ll never get to do so again, declares it a good batch.
“The First Taste of Loneliness” is best when focused on such small but important everyday details. Its portrayal of the immediate, intense pain of mourning can be overwrought, but the bulk of this admittedly overlong film is given over to a more patient, restrained and gracefully observed study of how life reshapes itself around an absence — as Yue, her mother Luna (Xi Meijuan) and her teenage daughter Moon (Wang Shengdi) deal with the sadness, the relief and the faint sense of betrayal that comes from carrying on, while keeping space for the dead man’s spirit in their respective lives.
Shot and structured with grand-scale elegance to counter the intimacy of the storytelling, this is a stirring final entry in Gu’s “Landscape” trilogy, which began with his Cannes-premiered 2019 debut “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” and continued with 2023’s “Dwelling by the West Lake” — the three films connected not directly by characters or narratives but a shared style of melancholic family portraiture. Premiering in the main competition at the Busan Film Festival, “Loneliness” again demonstrates the filmmaker’s formal prowess, with its preponderance of ambitiously floating pans and heavily populated setpieces. It has a broader, more populist streak than its predecessors, which could net it greater global distribution, but has its artistic downsides: An overreliance on stickily emotive ballads to unnecessarily articulate the characters’ feelings is a particular debit.
Somewhat heavily expository dialogue informs us that Yue, formerly a fashion director in Beijing, has recently returned with Moon to the family apartment in the city of Hangzhou in southeast China. Home to Luna and her late husband for decades, it’s a roomy, rambling space with spectacular views of the Qiantang River and, in Zhou Xingyu’s excellent production design, a storied buildup of clutter. Mikiya Takimoto’s camera lingers affectionately on stacked bookshelves — not even old cassette tapes have been thrown away — and desktops heavy with ornaments, notes and photographs that reveal in shorthand a life rich in love. Even in death, the man maintains a palpable presence in the home.
But it may be time for at least some remnants of the past to make way for the present. Luna implores Yue, recently divorced, not to get stuck in a holding pattern, either in her career or her relationships — but Luna, too, needs to make some changes. She tentatively accepts the romantic advances of another man, Xu (Xu Chaoying), opening herself to a kind of happiness she’d largely forgotten how to feel. Moon, meanwhile, is struggling at school but on the precipice of adulthood; as the young woman begins to make her own decisions in life, Yue must relinquish a degree of maternal responsibility.
Written by Gu with Yang Yikun, the screenplay, delicately braids these three arcs in such a way that each woman’s new freedoms complement the others’, while Takimoto’s bravura camerawork — painting in watercolor shades of misty gray and mossy green — often physically connects their stories in languid, widely swooping movements. And while the three leads’ performances are sensitively synched, Xi Meijuan is especially poignant as a widow trying to maintain a level of grieving decorum while embracing fresh experiences and sources of joy: A lovely scene of her and Xu dancing with other couples in a public square hits just the right note of romantic sentimentality tempered with elegiac sorrow. If “The First Taste of Loneliness” hits overly maudlin notes elsewhere — literally so, in the case of Sylvian Wang’s plaintive, piano-heavy score — it never feels cynical or manufactured in its emotions. Its moments of overstatement are entirely human, en route to a lighter, softer state of serenity.
