Chinese director Gu You has concluded his ‘Landscape’ trilogy with the premiere of “The First Taste of Loneliness” in the main competition at the Busan Film Festival. The film serves as a patient and restrained study of family life following a bereavement, centering on three generations of women in Hangzhou.
A portrait of grief and everyday details
The narrative opens with an extended bedside vigil as a mother, her daughter, and her granddaughter mourn the loss of a husband, father, and grandfather who died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. While the film occasionally leans into overwrought expressions of immediate mourning and maudlin territory through a piano-heavy score and emotive ballads, it finds strength in quieter, everyday moments.
Following the death, the daughter Yue, played by Zhou Xun, tastes the final jar of her father’s homemade pickles. The film is largely dedicated to observing how life reshapes itself around an absence.
Three intertwined arcs
The screenplay braids three character arcs together: Yue, who has recently returned to her family’s apartment from Beijing following a divorce; her mother Luna, played by Xi Meijuan, who tentatively accepts romantic advances from another man named Xu (Xu Chaoying); and Yue’s teenage daughter Moon, played by Wang Shengdi, who is navigating the approach of adulthood and struggles at school.
Xi’s performance as a widow balancing grieving decorum with fresh experiences is highlighted as particularly poignant, especially in a public square dancing scene with Xu that blends romantic sentimentality with elegiac sorrow.
Cinematic style
Shot by cinematographer Takimoto Mikiya, the film utilizes grand-scale elegance, watercolor shades of misty gray and mossy green, and widely swooping camera movements to link the characters’ stories. The apartment itself—filled with stacked bookshelves, notes, and photographs—maintains the palpable presence of the deceased man.
“The First Taste of Loneliness” follows Gu’s previous entries in the trilogy: his 2019 Cannes-premiered debut “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” and 2023’s “Dwelling by the West Lake”. The three films are connected by a shared style of melancholic family portraiture rather than direct narratives.
