Aftershock

Feng Xiaogang

The story: On July 28, 1976, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale struck the Chinese city of Tangshan in Hebei in the wee hours of the morning. Reportedly, 655,000 people perished. Those who survived had their lives torn apart and one mother Li Yuanni (Xu Fan) has to live with the consequences when she is forced to make a choice between her seven-year-old twins – saving her son Fang Da or saving her daughter Fang Deng.

Adapting Zhang Ling’s novel Aftershock, China director Feng Xiaogang gives audiences both the tremors of the physical phenomenon as well as the emotional devastation wreaked by the earthquake.

Living in a geographically stable country, it can be hard to imagine the full force of nature’s fury when it is unleashed. What Feng has accomplished here is to convey the sense and the scale of the destruction – elemental, terrifying and absolute.

But unlike blockbusters such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004) where the shock and awe of the special effects scenes are often an end unto itself, here, it serves as a set-up to a far more moving story.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, Yuanni’s husband is killed and her two children are trapped under two opposite ends of a beam. Lifting the beam at one end would save one child and kill the other; not making a decision would result in both dying as precious seconds ticked away.

Xu Fan’s excellent performance makes you feel the full weight of the impossible decision facing her and you ache with her when she finally picks her son over her daughter. She never forgives herself for that choice and regret and guilt seep into her life.

That fateful decision haunts Fang Deng as well. She hears her mother’s decision, but then miraculously survives and turns into a solemn little girl (played by Zhang Zifeng). She is later adopted by a couple from the People’s Liberation Army who are sent to Tangshan to help with rescue efforts, but she has to live with the knowledge of her mother’s choice.

Fang Da, too, is marked by the earthquake as his arm was crushed and he also has to deal with the weight of his mother’s expectations and hopes.

No one is left unscarred and yet, the film holds out the possibility of healing and reconciliation.

The story then moves to Sichuan when it is struck by an earthquake in 2008. Fang Da (Li Chen) and Fang Deng (Zhang Jingchu) both join in the aid efforts and end up meeting each other.

Feng adroitly refrains from showing us the recognition scene, effectively packing the heartwrenching reunion between mother and daughter with an even bigger emotional wallop.

This reviewer has not been so completely wrung out from a film since Isao Takahata’s classic anti-war classic Grave Of The Fireflies (1988).

Aftershock then ends with an actual survivor paying his respects at the earthquake memorial in Tangshan. It seems a bit abrupt but also makes the point that the upheavals experienced by that one family was multiplied hundreds and thousands of times.

Author Lung Ying-tai once said of a book she wrote that it was a literary joss stick offered to the millions who were killed during the Chinese civil war.

This 10-hanky weepie is Feng’s cinematic joss stick to those who died during the Tangshan earthquake as well as his tribute to those who went on with the business of living despite having their lives shattered.

(ST)