In March 2020, a teenage girl had to isolate at home because a classmate tested positive for COVID-19. To avoid any risk, the young woman’s mother’s employer asks her to also stay at home. This forced confinement will weigh heavily on an already fragile family relationship.
Posted yesterday at 10:30 a.m.
Although celebrated at home, Taiwanese filmmaker Chung Mong-hong is still little known internationally. Revealed in 2008 thanks to ting chepresented in the Un certain regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, the compatriot of Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-Liang had not presented a film on the circuit of the major international festivals since The Fourth Portrait in Locarno in 2010. He resurfaced last year with The Fallsselected at Horizons, an official section of the Venice Film Festival, as well as at the Toronto festival.
Inspired by the pandemic in which the entire planet has been plunged for almost two years, the filmmaker, also author of the screenplay, explores the psychological effects of confinement with a mother and her teenage daughter. This intention, very commendable, however leads to a story whose ramifications seem a little wobbly. We don’t really know which avenue Chung Mong-hong wanted to take.
First psychological drama between a mother having trouble understanding the reasons why her daughter confines herself to her room by withdrawing completely from the world, the film then tends to switch to something else. The reversals thus become less credible, and the different tones that the filmmaker uses do not always harmonize well.
At times too emphatic, not avoiding excesses of sentimentality either, The Falls (The falls is the French title) also sometimes flirts with the codes of horror drama. These abrupt breaks in tone do nothing to help the narrative of this overly long film.
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Drama
The Falls (VF: The falls)
Chung Mong-hong
With Gingle Wang, Alyssa Chia, Lee-zen Lee
2:09 a.m.