The Farewell is a quiet film that builds and builds and builds into a wonderful exploration of belonging, loss, family love, crab vs lobster, and hiding feelings, even though it may be tough to hide yours and you’ll shed a tear or two. I know I did.
It is written and directed by Lulu Wang, who was born in Beijing but emigrated with her family to America when she was six, and it is loosely a memoir. The film opens in Changchun, a city in China’s northeast, with an elderly woman being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and given maybe three months to live.
This is Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), or ‘Grandma’, and she doesn’t know she is going to die because her family have chosen not to tell her, as appears to be the Chinese custom. (Her sister, Little Nai Nai, played by Wang’s real-life great-aunt, tells her that the CT scans show only ‘benign shadows’, then shoos her from the hospital. Later, the family will even doctor test results. They are very determined on the not-telling front.)
Meanwhile, in New York, we have her Chinese-American granddaughter, Billi (a standout performance from the rapper Awkwafina), who is close to Nai Nai even though they haven’t seen each other since Billi left with her parents as a child. A cousin’s wedding is hastily planned so that everybody can return to China under the guise of a celebration that is, in fact, a farewell. Nai Nai is thrilled to have everyone sitting around her dining table once again and, my goodness, the feasts that are prepared. You will seriously want to get up and lick the screen. (I saw the film in Soho, cut through Chinatown on my way home, and bought two hulking crabs from the Chinese grocery store for dinner.
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