The successes of Bi Gan’s films — Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night — have had a clear influence on young, artistically minded filmmakers from China, especially those interested in the cinema of memory, dreams, and the poetic. Among them is Binbin Li, who in 2023 completed his feature-length narrative debut The Night Rain South Township, which strongly evokes associations with the aforementioned Kaili Blues.
The main inspiration for its creation was a collection of literary texts from Zhenba County in Shaanxi Province, the director’s home region. One of these was the essay Wild Fruit, describing the bond between two lovers of literature formed through the poem Song of Wild Fruits. This story became one of the narrative axes of the film, whose original Chinese title can be translated precisely as Song of Wild Fruits. Moreover, according to Li, the wild fruit also symbolizes for him the people of southern Shaanxi: growing in silence, passing unnoticed, existing far from big cities, and even from civilization and history.
Indeed, the people depicted in The Night Rain South Township seem to exist outside any clearly defined time and space. The film blends elements associated with the past, the 1980s and 90s, and also with the present, creating the impression that the village does not belong to a specific era; instead it becomes a collection of overlapping memories. Li attempts to capture the raw, rural, yet at the same time poetic side of his home province and to express a spiritual attachment to the region through the medium of cinema. It is in this respect that he resembles Bi Gan, who in his debut took a similar step and linked his hometown of Kaili with a space of memory, dream, regret, and persistently returning images.
The main characters of the film are Yu Chen and Lin Cheng. The former is a young man returning to the countryside after years away. His alienation and unfamiliarity with local customs become some of the central themes of the production. Lin Cheng, on the other hand, is a local teacher who came from a larger city but chose to settle in Shaanxi. The actress playing her, Xuanyu Chen, is a young, talented performer strongly associated with contemporary Chinese independent cinema; in the film she uses the regional dialect, which is meant to tie her character more closely to the setting.
Undoubtedly the film’s greatest asset is its visual presentation. Li makes excellent use of the region’s landscapes: picturesque mountains, mist, humidity, forest paths, modest homesteads, and spaces that seem to exist on the border between documentary observation and poetic recollection. Combined with images of local customs, they create an intriguing glimpse into the spiritual and cultural landscape of southern Shaanxi. Unfortunately, beyond the aesthetic pleasures, The Night Rain South Township rather quickly begins to lose itself in its own ruminations.
Individual scenes and sequences can be dazzling, but assembled into a whole they prove wearisome, lacking in variety, and devoid of sufficiently interesting events. The film is overloaded with characters about whom we know too little for their presence to resonate emotionally. It also features a surprising amount of dialogue, often unnaturally expository, which prevents it from succeeding as poetic cinema. There are too few vivid characters and intriguing events for it to work as a successful drama, and simultaneously an excess of words – sometimes about the most obvious matters – for it to function as oneiric slow cinema.
While watching, The Night Rain South Township constantly reminded me of Kaili Blues, at times seeming not so much a sincere presentation of Shaanxi as an attempt to replicate a more famous director’s success. Bi, however, was able not only to create a poetic mood, utilize unhurried narrative pacing, and disrupt the perception of the depicted world, but also to make the characters engaging and to dazzle with formal solutions. In Kaili Blues, dreaminess and temporal dislocation were not mere decoration; they emerged from the very structure of the film. In Li’s work, similar elements more often feel externally imposed, not an inherent part of the production he offers.
Binbin Li is rather too interested in attractive images and attempts to strike poetic sensations, to the detriment of practically every other aspect of the film. His characters remain indistinct, devoid of stronger emotions, frequently shown from such a distance that it is difficult to bond with them or truly understand them. The film’s spirituality, meanwhile, tends to be expressed too literally: through dreams, signs, reflections spoken outright, and the immediate confirmation of their meaning in reality. As a result, subtlety fades, often giving way to declarativeness.
The Night Rain South Township is undeniably a visually beautiful film. It builds impressionistic images of nature and rural regions, at times achieving an atmosphere of genuine suspension between waking and dream. Yet the stylistic choices, dialogue, and overall narrative construction weaken a significant portion of the positive impressions. It is an interesting debut, showing that Li possesses visual talent and considerable artistic ambition. At the same time, it also shows that he should pay greater attention to dramaturgy, character work, and script discipline. Without this, his cinema risks remaining a collection of beautiful but too loosely connected images.
The Night Rain South Township
Yě guǒ zhī gē
Directed by: Binbin Li
Written by: Binbin Li, Qian Zhang
Studio: Shaanxi Runzhi Film and Television Culture Media Co., Ltd., Xi’an Radio and Television Station Art Center Co., Ltd.
Cast: Yuan Jiahuan, Chen Xuanyu, Li Shicai, Liu Ke i inni.
