“Dear You,” directed by Lan Hongchun, is a historical film centering around qiaopi, or letters and money sent by Chinese workers overseas back to their families on the mainland – specifically, qiaopi sent by Teochew immigrants in Southeast Asia throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
The film, which is spoken primarily in Teochew and features a slew of nonprofessional actors, became a sleeper hit in China, and opens in Atlanta this weekend. It’s an admirable attempt on Lan’s part to bring attention to a segment of history that, if you didn’t grow up in China, you might not know much about. But, an admirable story doesn’t always make for an interesting movie. And “Dear You” suffers from poor pacing, structure, and characterization.
“Dear You” is about a young man, Den Bhagseng (Wang Yantong) who flees China in the 1950s to avoid military conscription. He eventually ends up in Thailand working as a rickshaw driver, trying to raise enough money to send back to his wife, Sogriou (Wang Xiaohui), and eventually return to her and their children.
But, we don’t start in the past with Bhagseng as a young man. Instead, we start in the present day with a much older Sogriou (Wu Shaoqing). She hasn’t seen Bhagseng in decades and doesn’t like to think of him too much – instead of returning to China like he promised, he married another woman, stayed in Thailand, and became unfathomably wealthy. In the 1970s, he sent a letter containing nothing but a photo of him and his new family. He kept sending letters after that, but she never responded.
But once again, the movie doesn’t really start with her either. Instead, we start with Sogriou’s grandson, Hiou-ui (Zheng Runqi), who is in serious debt and needs to find the funds to fix it fast. He decides to travel to Thailand to find his long lost, richer-than-God grandpa, hoping he’ll feel bad enough about abandoning his family to at least send them some money.
If reading that felt a little discombobulating, I’ve successfully recreated the feeling of watching the opening of this film. “Dear You” attempts to hide the ball with its structure, throwing the audience into the middle of what feels like it might be a mob movie as Hiou-ui yells at the collector hounding him on the phone, promising them he’s good for the money. The film quickly evolves into a family mystery (we don’t hear much about Hiou-ui’s debts after the opening), but that too quickly becomes a moot point.
Therein lies the rub with “Dear You.” After about 30 minutes, there’s just about no narrative tension left whatsoever. We start in the present, where Hiou-ui solves the mystery of Bhagseng’s other family quite quickly, the answer being that there never was one. He died in 1960, and the woman in the picture – Zia Lamgi (Li Sitong), just a friend – continued to send letters and money posing as Bhagseng.
The rest of the movie is spent mostly in flashback and focuses on the relationship between Bhagseng and Lamgi. The movie’s haphazard structure becomes a little more stable here, but it continues to struggle with finding tension. Lamgi clearly has a bit of a crush on Bhagseng, but the audience already knows that nothing romantic ever happened between them. We started the movie thinking that Bhagseng was a total cad, but by this point have already learned he’s a great guy who only gets into trouble because he has a tendency to try and save other people from harm.
Wang plays Bhagseng with a good bit of charm, but a character whose main trait is being a good person is not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world to perform. As Lamgi, Li is similarly stunted as a performer, playing a long-suffering woman who’s happy to continue to send money to her friend’s family long after his death – she is basically the human equivalent of a saint.
It’s of course possible that saint-like quality is based in fact – the script is reportedly based on real remittance letters, the stories from said letters interwoven into the narrative of the film. But real life, no matter how admirable and heartwarming, does not always make for an interesting film. And the decision to structure “Dear You” so the audience knows all of its secrets by the end of the third act is the icing on the cake.
