Visual Research: Movie：'Laughing to Die' ('Xi Sang'): Film Review

The title of young director Zhang Tao's first feature stems from the traditional Chinese concept of funerals for very old people being "joyous" because they have lived longer than they were expected to. But happiness is in short supply in Laughing to Die (Xi Sang), a harrowing drama about an ailing, impoverished elderly woman subjected to one humiliation after another as she moves in with her children while she awaits a vacancy at a nursing home.

A stark depiction of a meek octogenarian's slow and painful shuffle through a cycle of rejection and outright abuse during her twilight days, Laughing to Die is akin to Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story but with the brutal, hardened cynicism in parent-children relationships brought much more graphically to the forefront. Sharing a similar sentiment (and certain storytelling and visual traits) with The Death of Mr Lazarescu — Cristi Puiu's equally heartrending account of how medical staff from a string of hospitals try to get a sick old man off their charge — Laughing To Die is a relentless j'accuse about dysfunctional social relationships in a country obsessed with its own self-congratulatory, gleaming national narrative.

Admittedly, some of these characters runs dangerously close to being archetypes, and events sometimes unfold like generic melodramatic tropes: Death and disaster seem to follow poor, tragic Madam Lin. Still, Zhang's documentary-like approach — thanks to the taut camerawork of Wu Zhuo and Chen Xiang — injects much authenticity into the proceedings. The pic ultimately shows how all the characters are — like Madam Lin herself — victims of circumstances out of their control. More than acting simply out of innate personal greed, Madam Lin's troubled descendants — working-class families under the breadline, or teens and twenty somethings grappling with their lives in various confused ways — are all braving the fallout of unfettered urbanization-led development unfolding across China today.