Billi and her parents flew off to America years before and we can sense the disconnect. Billi’s uncle journeyed to Japan when he found success as a businessman; another aunt plans on sending her young son to learn in America. Chinese culture teaches that no one person’s life is simply their own, it is just a small part of the whole. In geek terms, Billi and others in her family have been separated from the Bong collective, and now they are trying to learn how to fit back into it, which causes all sorts of family conflict, which Wang handles with nuance, deft insights, and comedy that could only come from her own life. These aren’t people who hate one another; they just don’t know how to relate after so long apart. A particularly awkward dinner scene mines comedy gold as everyone tries to prove how Chinese they still are, regardless of what it says on their passport.
The Farewell has some beautiful, truthful things to say about how love persists across the oceans. We often move away and leave our family, but we are more intrinsically tied to them than we ever will be to anyone else. Watching Bili at a formative point in her life, comprehend the influence her grandmother has had on her while fighting her natural instinct to literally say goodbye makes for powerful filmmaking. The film is likely to make you wish you had spent more time with your grandparents, but it will also reaffirm how important your connection to them was though you didn’t.
Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is a phenomenal movie with multiple movie moments. Wang has written a remarkably personal film that claims to be “Based on an Actual Lie” and she’s found precisely the right star to maintain the delicate balance of the story – one that easily could have become sentimental and manipulative but resonates with truth from the first scene to the last. This will go down as one of the best performance of Sundance 2019, a genuine, heartfelt acting turn that proves that Awkwafina has a range that even her most devoted fans may not have suspected
She never once feels mannered or forced, completely disappearing into her likable, heart-breaking character.
THE FAREWELL HAS NO SCHEDULED THEATRICAL RELEASE IN THE UK BESIDES THE ONE WHICH WAS SCREENED AT SUNDANCE LONDON
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