Director: Yibo Zheng
Writer: Yibo Zheng
Cast: Xin Li, Peiqi Xu
Running time: 35mins
Rewind, Replay is one of the rarest of treasures. A beautifully shot drama with fantastically acted characters, exploring really interesting themes such as love, time and (I think), the social gap between younger people from technologically savvy China, and those left behind. This is a stylish statement of intent from young writer-director Yibo Zheng, cinematographer Zongsheng Fu and composer Yu Zhou, all of whom brought a lot to table, and left next to nothing I would criticise.
After finishing the film, I instantly watched all 35 minutes again. As much as this fits in perfectly with the title of the film, honestly it felt uncannily similar to the ‘new game +’ function in a video game. Watching the film again felt like a completely different experience, once armed with the information I’d received the first-time round. For example, after the highly emotional ending of the film, a repeat viewing uncovers the overall tone, which starts to seem obvious and self-explanatory.
That is not to say you won’t get it without a second watch, though. The standard criticisms of the storytelling trope of telling events purposely out of order don’t apply here. Even though the climax of the story is something unambiguously described and explained as having happened (the ending of a relationship), the way that this traumatic psychological event takes place is so emotionally resonant that it works as an ending. In a sense, the memory provided in the finale truly does become the climax of the film despite happening before the other events.
In this case, as in many others, directorial and compositional choices compliment the thematic points being put across by the story of the film in a remarkably satisfying way.
The narrative of Rewind, Replay revolves around a dedicated high school teacher tracking down a student who deliberately crossed out their answers from an exam paper in an act of academic self-harm, all the while struggling with dealing with a break-up and her overbearing mother. And oh, what a mother this is; we’re talking perhaps the most terrifying figure of maternal super-ego this side of Norma Bates. The mother (Wang Yanmin) berates our heroic lead, Zeng Ke (Xin Li) on her lack of verve and vigour, as well as ‘half-arsing’ a blind date (opposite the compelling, naturalistic acting of Chen Zhuwei as ‘Blind Date Guy’) she’d put her up to. In a really interestingly presented scene, the opportunity is given to depict a strange kind of negative nostalgia. Zeng Le feels like a little girl just wondering what she did wrong, a side effect all of us recognise immediately from childhood, a kind of paralysis in the presence of primal fear.
This is one of the key themes of the film, a kind of distrust in familial love in favour of romantic love. Familial love is associated with bad nostalgia whereas romantic love has a way of making you, in the words of the film, unprecedentedly happy. The loss of a romantic partner isn’t just a horrific rejection, but also the dissolution of a family in itself. When you imprint someone so hard into your memory as a sort of reservoir of positivity to draw on in the future, at some point you just prefer to hang on to a happy memory of days past than truly live in the present.
I mentioned earlier the presence of the themes of time, love, and some abstract notions of Chinese cultural and socio/economic themes. When it comes to time and love I’m happy to pin down and proclaim those themes present. The other themes though, I’m not sure how qualified I am to verify. I’m going to write down what I read into the film and I’m happy to be wrong, but I’d like to flag up the things I’m sure about and the things I’m bound to be wrong about because I’m naturally ignorant in countless ways about Chinese culture.
I bring this up now because the terrifying mother is subtitled as having some kind of a dialect. Without an ear for the language, I’m struggling to understand exactly what is being lost in translation here. What I took it to mean in context was referring to a sort of urban/rural divide, and perhaps some sort of class difference mixed with access to technology, education, feminist philosophy and to an extent, Western influence. The tension between the ideals of having a career and helping her students and the more old-fashioned ideas of what women from poorer backgrounds should be focusing on seems to be tied in to the dialect in some way. I’d love to be able to recognise exactly what the dialect means for the main character’s relationship with various other characters also speaking in the dialect. For all I know, it could just be something about different regions and that’s it, to be fair.
At the same time, there are plenty of references to Western filmmakers here, too. They range from our heroine living in apartment 2001 (a door is a bit of a monolith, isn’t it?) to a Twin Peaks inspired philosophical discussion using black coffee, which I can’t help but think ties to David Lynch. The coffee scene actually ties into the deeper themes of the film really well, and contains the requisite story beats to justify its existence whilst looking and sounding fantastic.
One could even be moved into suggesting Russian influence in the film, with the striking photography of decaying urban environments seemingly being influenced by Tarkovsky’s materialism. As much as this film is a fully functioning self-contained drama with successful thematic representation and discussion, it’s also a statement piece from a young filmmaker (or set of filmmakers) who is (or are) clearly very educated and very talented.
In the end, the message is remarkably clear. A break-up functions as a sort of death of the director. In some way, love functions as a marker of worth. Love turns a first-person life into some kind of third person life, being watched and documented and full of meaning. How much these ideas resonate is likely dependant on an individual viewer’s level of sentimentality. For me, it worked completely and brought the film into the inner echelon of my favourite independent films I’ve ever seen. That being said, I have of course seen When Harry Met Sally about 15 times, so clearly, I’m susceptible to this kind of thing. I can’t recommend this thing enough.