Wang adopts a difficult chronology, moving backwards and forwards between decades, but using as a fulcrum one major incident, the drowning death of the Liu’s son, Xingxing, dealing with the immediate consequences and the longer eventualities, as well as initially keeping the actual circumstances of the boy’s death a mystery until, years later, the sad truth is finally revealed. The director makes the audience concentrate as the film slips between time periods, with the results of certain events only be found out by the audience much later, and thus putting more recent occurrences into perspective. The diverging paths of the Lius and the Shens are also indicative of the directions the new China, the Lius moving to Fujian province, a major manufacturing hub in China (the device you may be using now was probably manufactured there or at least has a high proportion of Fujian-manufactured components), living among the largely non-locals, internal immigrants from the north of the country wanting the stable, good-paying jobs in the factories, eventually suffering the fallout of the one child policy. whereas the Shens move into the state-sanctioned real estate explosion, projects and developments sweeping away millennia of tradition and community without a second thought, a recurring theme in the films of Zhangke Jia.

Although concentrating on a limited number of characters, Wang’s film is nevertheless complex, with relationships and motivations only being revealed in later scenes, and some noted that the first hour may test some viewers as the situation and the characters are established. Wang’s cast is largely comprised of character actors but who have also had roles in major commercial hits, including Ai Liya (Miss Granny), Du Jiang (Operation Red Sea), Zhao-Yan Guo-Zhang (The Devotion Of Suspect X), Li Jingjing (Monster Hunt), Qi Xi (The Whistleblower), Wang Jungchun (Shadow), Roy Wang (Legend Of Ravaging Dynasties) and Yong Mei (The Assassin), with Xu Chung making his screen debut as Yingming Shen, and both lead actors, Wang Jungchun and Yong Mei won the Silver Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival for their performances, just two of a van load of awards the film has won as locations as far-flung as Beijing, Minsk, Uruguay and the festival held on the island which was Ingmar Bergman’s home for much of his later life, Faro.

The critics, mostly catching this on the festival circuit, were fulsome in their almost unanimous praise, Asian Movie Pulse saying ‘In the end the mathematics are simple: the viewers who remain patient for the first hour of the film will be rewarded in the end with a subtle and detailed piece that shows Wang Xiaoshuai us close to the top of his game’, while Screen Daily believed ‘A challenging narrative structure - withholding key information and skipping between several time frames - makes this film a daunting watch overall. But Wang’s ambition and seriousness, aided by strong ensemble performances, ensure it is a formidable and, for the most part, involving work of novelistic scope’ .The Observer found ’So measured is the pacing, so sinuous the timeline, so understated the subtle ache of the performances that you don’t immediately realise that Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite three-hour drama has been performing the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery on the audience since pretty much the first scene’.