A conversation on the internet – soon to be followed by another one. A young woman answers a man – no doubt her father – whose voice we hear from a computer. Outside, the buildings where dozens of windows like this are shining at night. The conversation gives us a key: the Covid-19 has hit China, everyone is locked inside, at home, watching films.
Framed by two conversations with the absent father, A Peaceful Divorce sets its focus on everyday spaces and gestures during lockdown. The director films the living room, the kitchen, the windows reflecting the inside instead of suggesting a way out. The mother is testing a machine not quite ready for use; the father-in-law is cooking. Images of a different texture, however, come to unsettle this recording of everyday life: we see another man in the same kitchen as he smiles at the camera while he’s about to taste a fruit; a family celebration with different faces sees the young woman wincing at the camera. The second conversation with her father will be clarifying what is really at stake in this film: dealing with her parents’ divorce, which leads her to lockdown with her mother but not with her father whose voice we hear. The mix of images then turns out to be something like layers of time, an invocation of the loved and absent father, through images recorded in another time. The stakes? Turning lived experience into film material, and lack of affection into a network of images. (N.L.)
Sidi Wang
Film presentation by the director