“The Farewell” and “The Art of Self-Defense.”
When a movie starts with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, what next? The first thing we saw in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) was an X-ray of a man’s stomach, with a tumor clearly visible, and Lulu Wang’s new film, “The Farewell,” sets off with similar starkness. An aged woman undergoes a CT scan, and we learn that she has Stage IV lung cancer and three months to live. But here’s the difference. Kurosawa’s hero, a meek civil servant, took stock of his mortality and decided to waste not a drop of the time that remained. Wang’s elderly lady, by contrast, is a merry old soul, already skilled at being alive, and requiring no further encouragement. So nobody tells her that she’s going to die.
She is known as Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), or “Grandma,” and her home is in Changchun, in northeastern China. Meanwhile, her beloved granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) is in New York, and it’s the distance between them— generational as well as geographical— that the film explores. When Billi was six, a quarter of a century ago, she and her parents, Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Jian (Diana Lin), moved to America; they still live there, and speak English among themselves. Billi has her own apartment, plus a ring in her nostril and, most recently, a rejection letter for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Great.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 22, 2019 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 22, 2019 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
TRIPLE FAULT
A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay.
NIGHT MUSIC
“Stereophonic” and Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” on Broadway.
LITTLE OLD HER
Is Taylor Swift doing too much?
BEASTLY MATTERS
Where the logic behind the concern for animal welfare begins and ends.
PULSE
He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.
TOWER IN FLAMES
What kind of right is academic freedom?
THE BATTLE FOR ATTENTION
How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?
ON NATIVE GROUNDS
Deb Haaland faces the cruel history of the agency she now leads.
DESIGN FOR LIVING
Can converting office towers into apartments save empty downtowns from ruin?
HOROSCOPES WRITTEN BY MY MOTHER
Your zodiac alignment this month is governed by Venus, the planet of intuition, something my daughter Bess seems to lack.