About the Film
It appears suddenly, the shadowless tower of the title. A magical tower, which has no shadow, or, rather, its shadow can only be seen from a Tibetan temple. Suspended between the present and the past is Gu, belonging to that middle generation in China, with which the director himself evidently also identifies, who still quotes Mao, who meets up in convivial evenings among divorced friends to get drunk, who is anchored to an often controversial past, here represented by his estranged father, imprisoned years earlier for having (perhaps) harassed a woman on a bus.
Gu was a poet and now is a nice, good-looking, moderately successful food and restaurant critic and a lifelong Beijing native, who masks his pain in alcohol and has a tentative love story with his pretty and spirited 25-year old photographer Ouyang. He is also the adoring but only occasional father to his bright little daughter Smiley who lives in the daily care of his sister Wenhui and her husband Li Jun.
When Li Jun informs Gu that his father is still alive, and that he regularly make a 300 miles round trip to Beijing to secretly see his family, Gu suddenly begins to reevaluate his role as both as a father and as a son.
Zhang Lu never forces his hand, never dramatises situations but maintains a light and complicit tone, capable of showing not so much the actions as the effects they have on the protagonist and on the people surrounding him. This beautiful, incredibly touching film captures suspended moments - a kiss, a father-daughter dialogue reflected in the water, a kite on the beach, snow in Spring ... there are no crises, no big events, but many small misunderstandings, or magic moments of wordless dialogues, distances, fears described with that great humanity and poetry that have been Zhang’s trademark since his wonderful debut film Tang Poetry.
May be many of us think to be shadowless, not a trace left in the past of their passage in this world, not a shadow stretching toward the future, actually they may be completely wrong, since, may be, somebody, somewhere will see the shadow they cast and will add another unexpected layer of meaning to their lives.
Teresa Cavina
