‘My Friend An Delie’: Tokyo Review

Dir: Dong Zijian. China. 2024. 111mins

The death of a father opens a door to the past in this brooding drama from actor-turned-director Dong Zijian, who appeared in Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White, and also takes the title role here. Travelling back to his hometown in northeastern China, Li Mo (Liu Haoran) spots a childhood friend, An Delie (Dong) – but An Delie claims not to recognise him. As the two men travel together through the snowbound wilderness, memories of their childhood friendship start to coalesce. Adapted from a novel by Shuang Xuetao, this is an accomplished first feature which, while it could handle tightening up in places, potently evokes the uncanny no man’s land of grief.

 A quality production across the board

My Friend An Delie shares a narrative device, if not the lightness of touch and humour, with Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter. But unlike Hogg’s single-location exploration of the painful processing of a death, Zijian’s picture relies heavily on flashbacks to the shared school days that link the two travellers. It’s a combination that feels a little unwieldy, with the school sequences a more conventional element that undermines the uneasy oddness of the present-day sequences, which unfold in an icily purgatorial backwater.

Still, this is a quality production across the board – the handsome cinematography, by Pema Tseden collaborator Lu Songye, is a particular stand out. The film should be an eye-catching proposition going forward, both domestically and at further festivals.

There’s a sense of disquiet to the film even before Li Mo embarks on his journey to reconnect with his past. A sinuous tracking shot shows him running in the evening, an eerie pink light in the night sky and the feeling of absolute stillness that comes before a storm. The score – another quality element – combines a few questioning woodwind notes with something inexorable, almost mechanical, providing a rhythm as Li Mo jogs. Very little happens in the scene, and yet there’s a clear skin-prickling sensation of something amiss.

The darkness seeps into another key sequence, the night flight back to Shenyang. The cabin lights are dimmed and the faces of the two characters are framed in velvety shadows. Li Mo approaches An Delie, but not only does his former friend not recognise him, he starts to cry. They finally establish that they are travelling to the same funeral, that of Li Mo’s father. “I have a friend called Li Mo,” says An Delie, “But you are not him.” When a snowstorm closes their destination airport and they are diverted to an alternative, the two men decide to travel together in a beaten up rental vehicle into the soft, sad blue light of the winter.

The flashbacks are a striking tonal contrast, with a look that feels almost nostalgic in tone. There’s a honeyed warmth to the colour palette and – as the friendship between the two schoolboys is forged over a shared love of football – a weakness for generic childhood idyll signifiers like shots of frolicking kids in fields of swishing grasses. There are, however, also hints of shared suffering that unites the two children. Li Mo’s browbeaten and disappointed mother leaves her husband and son to start a new life. And An Delie lives with a father he despises, and has a mottled accumulation of bruises to show for it.

The more that we see of the past, the more we begin to understand how much Li Mo has blocked from his memory. And seeds of doubt about the present day scenes start to take root. 

A late night meal in deserted hotel restaurant is framed with shrine-like symmetry. For a brief moment, it seems that An Delie remembers his friend after all, as well as other details from their childhood. “You remember so much from back then. I’ve forgotten most of them,” says Li Mo over shots of spirits. “That’s good,” says An Delie, his face once again framed in darkness.”Forgetting is good. Forget everything.”