This is another Chinese film that came as a recommendation from our cinephile friend and as it appears to be the debut feature of its director Zhang Dalei, is probably far too obscure for me to come across it in the ordinary course of things. It won a bunch of awards and except for a short sequence at the end, is entirely in black and white.

In the 1990s, 12-year-old Zhang Xiaolei enjoys his summer holidays in a small city in Inner Mongolia. He is never without his trademark nunchaku as he learns to swim, hangs out his friends, attends family gatherings, and watches films at the cinema. His parents worry and fuss over important matters such as his grandmother’s longstanding illness, whether or not he gets into a prestigious school when the holidays end, and securing employment for his father after he has been let go following the reform of the state-owned enterprise he used to work for. As a child however these adult concerns mostly go over his head and though he witnesses these happenings around him, he doesn’t appear to grasp their importance. He doesn’t appear to have any particularly close friends but he is fascinated by the doings of a local tough who extorts money from other youths and eventually gets into trouble with the law.

The premise immediately recalls similar films such as A Summer at Grandpa’s but even more so than the norm The Summer is Gone lacks any real overarching plot. The excellence of the cinematography and the director’s knack for choosing interesting vignettes to put on screen ensures that the film is never boring. However there is still a sense of it meandering somewhat pointlessly and there is little emotional engagement to be had. I note that it cheats as well by not consistently sticking to the point of view of Xiaolei. The camera wanders at times to show scenes which complete the story of his family’s lives even where he isn’t present. As my wife notes, this is less an attempt to tell a story about a boy than to capture a sense of what that era in China was like. It’s pretty clear that the film is at least a semi-autobiographical account of the director’s own childhood.

It has to be said that this was indeed an interesting period in China’s development. The reform of state-owned enterprises in pursuit of efficiency led to mass layoffs. Many of the newly unemployed went on to found private enterprises that would in time help kick off the super-fast economic growth with results that we can all see today. As we can see in this film, this involves the ascendance of a new entrepreneur class that Xiaolei’s father, a prideful man, is resentful but powerless against. To the boy himself, he notices that while they could previously sneak into the cinema to watch films for free, privatization means that they now actually have to buy tickets which are an unaffordable luxury. I like to think that his father moving away for work also serves as a foreshadowing of the mass migrations to the big cities. It’s all good material but the choice of a young boy as the point of view character isn’t the best way to show how society is changing. I suppose this depiction would have nostalgia value for those who lived through it what with the liberal use of the music of the era and all but it does nothing much for me.

Overall I found this to be a fine film in its own way but the lack of emotional engagement that Xiaolei has with other characters makes it not very memorable to me. Something like A Summer at Grandpa’s is far superior as it understands that telling a story from a child’s perspective requires themes that a child can understand. The Summer is Gone doesn’t even work as a coming of age story due to the film’s inability to really convey Xiaolei’s inner thoughts.