‘As The River Goes By’: Busan Review

Dir/scr. Charles Hu. China. 2024. 99mins

Early on in As The River Goes By, writer-director Charles Hu signals that his debut feature, about a train driver confronting his past after a school reunion, is a meditation on traumatic memory. “Can aftershocks last for decades? For hundreds of years?” asks a supporting character, after Hu has already lingered on cracks in an apartment wall resulting from a recent earthquake and established that the protagonist is suffering from recurrent headaches. It’s common for art-house fare to ruminate on how psychological fissures manifest themselves in mundane everyday experiences, but the abundance of obvious motifs and metaphors within As The River Goes By reduces the pain of the past to a mere trope.

 Hu’s screenplay takes trauma as a device rather than as a subject

As The River Goes By receives its world premiere in Busan’s New Currents after receiving the festival’s 2024 post-production grant. Hu evidently took full advantage of the funding award: this is a fluidly-realised debut and its technical finesse should ensure further engagements at Asian-themed events. However, there is a persistent feeling that Hu has constructed a mood piece based on a survey of contemporary world cinema rather than by cultivating a distinctive authorial voice. The interest of potential distributors is likely to drift elsewhere.

In a quiet industrial town, train driver Li Mingliang (Dylan Xiong) leads a rote existence that is largely defined by family history: Li’s father worked for the railroad before pulling a disappearing act and his mother (Mandy Ma) arranged his job by leveraging relationships with her husband’s former colleagues. Li has been suffering from migraines which intensify when a reunion with school friends prompts distressing childhood memories concerning Ziqu, a female classmate who died in apparently tragic circumstances during a group outing along the local river.

On a more positive note, the reunion enables Li to reconnect with his childhood crush Song Qian (Eva Zhou) who has recently returned from Shanghai to attend to her ailing mother. Flashbacks to their upbringing reveal that Li wasn’t always the listless type: as a youngster he wrote a story entitled ’The Monster of Sand River’ and some of its details spill into his recollections. Past, present and adolescent fantasy blur from here, but it becomes clear that Li must make peace with his role in certain events if he is ever to truly move on.

Up to a point, As The River Goes By flows smoothly enough thanks to its aesthetic qualities. In keeping with the film’s title, Bai Xiaodan’s lived-in production design evokes aspects and colours of nature within even the plainest interiors, while Xu Hark’s textured cinematography largely favours various shades of blue and muggy greens. However, Xu also incorporates warm orange light when Li and Song take shelter under a bridge during a downpour. The emphasis on their dancing shadows on the wall as they make up for lost time cannot help but recall the iconic imagery of In The Mood For Love (2000) but nonetheless vividly conveys the rekindling of a curtailed relationship. Elsewhere, the ripples of the past are brought to the fore by Park14032’s electronic score, which exudes a haunting ambience and dials down effectively to a minimalist drone to suggest Li’s frequent headaches.

As the narrative interweaves past and present, Hu exhibits a subtle flair for transitions by deftly navigating timelines within the same scene or integrating digital photographs taken with mid-2000s consumer technology. In this respect, he is greatly assisted by Carlo Francisco Manatad’s seamless editing which also gifts the proceedings a gentle rhythm with an undercurrent of disturbance. Unfortunately, Hu’s screenplay takes trauma as a device rather than as a subject so most of the impressive technique on display is just that.

To stretch a thin idea to feature length, Hu has included several elements that fail to contribute to a satisfying whole. There is a clichéd ghost story with Li possibly capturing apparitions of Ziqu with the camera that was a present from his father. As a portrait of provincial malaise, Li’s situation has a Kafkaesque dimension (he is unexpectedly granted a promotion when the colleague who was meant to advance dies suddenly). Yet the world here otherwise seems to be one of mobility as opposed to servitude, with Song roaming freely and one of their friends enjoying a carefree lifestyle by a making a living through livestreaming. 

Within this artfully superficial tapestry, the principal players can only make a limited impression. Xiong projects a suitably burdened air but ultimately delivers a one-note performance. Some much-needed spark is provided by a charming Zhao, although Song’s handy knowledge on topics ranging from earthquakes to medical experiments on monkeys renders the character another one of the film’s contrivances.