The Brooklyn Rail

In late January at Sundance, I attended the world premiere of writer-director Jianjie Lin’s debut feature Brief History of a Family (Jia ting jian shi, 2024), the Chinese contender of the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition. A genre-bending coming-of-age thriller, the film finds an unforeseen angle to dig up the subdued intergenerational psyche shaped by China’s one-child policy.

Lin focuses on the middle-class nuclear family of high school rebel and only child Wei (Muran Lin). One day, Wei brings home his reticent and studious friend Shuo (Xilun Sun), whose mother died and whose father is an abusive alcoholic. As Wei’s parents (Feng Zu and Ke-Yu Guo) gradually grow sympathetic and fond of Shuo, the teens start to compete for the adults’ affection and resources. From here, jealousy and violence—as well as a murder mystery—stir up blood, sweat, and tears.

The result is a well-paced slowburn that accelerates and compels. Refraining from overt political discourse, the film lets cinematographer Jiahao Zhang’s surgical compositions and precise camera movements speak for themselves. As an only child whose parents were determined to send me to a prestigious US college (like Wei’s parents wish for him), I’m also in awe of Lin’s edgy bioinformatic visuals that specify the fears and angst of bearing these hefty expectations.

In late February here in Brooklyn, with the film still replaying in my head, I Zoomed with writer-director Lin while he prepared for the film’s European premiere at Berlinale.

Weiting Liu (Rail): I’ve been doing research on the existing coverage of Brief History of a Family. Some journalists and critics mention that it reminds them of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and last year’s Saltburn (2023). These films use the trope where a young outsider from the lower class befriends a rich schoolmate and starts having a taste of what it’s like to be part of a well-off family.

Jianjie Lin: I expected this. It’s a premise that’s already been done in different ways. I’ve heard some people say my film is like Saltburn but much better—I wouldn’t know because I’ve still yet to see the film. What’s always been important for me is to twist this familiar premise to serve my own story. I want to first trick the audience into thinking they know where things are going, and then offer them a singular viewing experience full of surprises.

Rail: Whether it’s a “trope” or not, it’s a fitting setup to bring out the multitude of Chinese nuclear family dynamics. At the start of the film, things appear fine in Wei’s family. As the narrative progresses, the family’s dark, twisted psyche starts to reveal itself. One aspect of this dark side is the parents’ denial of Wei’s self-agency, and how they view him as an extension of themselves—a very Chinese middle-class thing.

Lin: The Chinese middle-class thing is that they are rich to a point where they can afford to send Wei to a top-tier college in the US, but not rich enough to let him do whatever he wants. They just can’t help but need him to remain part of themselves. They’ve built a life they consider successful—and acknowledging a different way of life can trigger their own insecurities. Wei’s father sees going to college as the only path for Wei because he went to college himself. And this college education now needs to be in a more advanced form: a US Ivy League. These fixated parental expectations create conflicts among the family and inside Wei, who’s still developing his sense of self.

Rail: It’s convenient to stereotype Wei as the simple-minded rich kid, in contrast to the seemingly more complex and calculating Shuo. I myself actually relate to Wei more because of our similar backgrounds. He has more to offer than playing video games: he’s a promising athlete genuinely passionate about fencing, a talent and strength his parents don’t understand. He has suppressed so many emotions and thoughts—and this suppression can manifest itself as simplicity. Would you like to talk about the juxtaposition of Wei and Shuo?

Lin: They’re both complex, just in different ways. For example, you personally can understand what Wei wants, what he doesn’t want and what he eventually forces himself to want.

Shuo’s characterization is more symbolic. He represents this mysterious force that disrupts a deceptively happy family. He gives you room for imagination, so you have to make up your own mind about who he is and what his motivations are. While Wei grounds the story in reality, Shuo can of course also be interpreted as a real person, or something else. They’re both protagonists, and they work both together and separately to engage the audience.

Rail: I love the teen actors Lin and Sun’s performances of Wei and Shuo. Do you want to talk about the casting process of choosing them to lead this character-driven film?

Lin: When Lin came into the audition, he was instantly open, honest, and eager to show us what he can do. His almost hotheaded temperament really intrigued me, and I decided to actually bring part of him into the character of Wei. While guiding Lin into playing Wei, I started reshaping Wei to resemble Lin in real life. It became a collaborative and fluid process.

In comparison, I instantly knew Sun would be the one to play Shuo. They’re essentially the same person—reserved, mesmerizing—and his presence just made you want to know more about him.

Rail: I also want to talk about how you cast Zu and Guo to play Wei’s father and mother. They’re both established, well-known actors in China. Zu has this posh, educated look which is perfect for Wei’s father who has an acquired taste of western cultures. Wei’s mother is a more universally relatable character for women who have more individuality before marriage but then start dedicating most of their lives to their husbands and kids.

Lin: I sent Zu the script, which he read in the car in one-go. He immediately requested a call with me the next day. It was a quick decision for me to cast him. He’s skilled at both tennis and Chinese calligraphy and listens to western classical music like Bach—all the fancy things Wei’s father does in the film.

And I first saw Guo in a popular Chinese reality show See You Again, where she talks about the huge success of her debut lead performance in Red Cherry (1995), and her subsequent decisions over the next couple of decades to quit acting and get married. Besides the common life experience between the character and herself, I just dig her soft-spoken yet low-key tough mannerism. One thing she told me before I cast her really stuck with me: “Reading though this script is like trying to find the way out of a fog.”

Rail: What she said reminds me of a dreamlike sequence where Wei’s parents scream for Shuo in a foggy forest. The film features a few surrealist setpieces like this—where undercurrents of the characters’ conflicted emotions are on the same wavelength of the handheld shots and nonlinear narrative. The film’s director of photography Jiahao Zhang is a mutual friend of ours. Just like what you’ve done with the actors, you are constantly in dialogue with him.

Lin: I took a leap of faith with Zhang as I previously talked to many cinematographers in China with more working experience. I connected with him the most because our tastes match as cinephiles. Before shooting, I had some discussions with him about creating our own film language that responds to what we had at hand: the specific locations and the actors’ performances. With the film’s cinematography, which for sure stands out, we want the audience to enjoy a visual feast while experiencing something more visceral and profound.

Rail: I especially love the scene where you superimpose the microscopic visual of blood cells circulating veins onto a bird’s-eye view of the intertwined highway bridges where neon-lit traffic speeds through. I want to know about the film’s location shootings in China and why you frequently integrate biological visuals into the narrative. I know you had an interesting education background in bioinformatics before getting into filmmaking.

Lin: We shot in multiple cities: Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Beijing. My goal is to fabricate an unspecified modern look of China. I’m aware that many other Chinese films nowadays focus on particular regions which are key to delivering their messages. But I’d like my film to be about its genres and the characters’ psychology. I want this collage of location shootings to become a filter through which the audience see the characters as humans rather than certain people from certain cities.

With the biology-related visuals, I aim at developing my initial idea to put the characters under scrutiny. I want to blur the lines between the camera lens and a microscope, so the audience can amplify the characters and find out their own truths about these enigmatic people. Taking the highway bridges scene you mentioned as an example, it doesn’t solely consist of these primal, sensational visuals; editor Per K. Kirkegaard’s woozy cuts and composer Toke Brorson Odin’s magnetic score also augment our understanding of the characters’ inner feelings and thoughts at the time. We come up with innovative ideas as a team to add both style and depth onto the story and onto the screen.