Review - The Falls

February 12, 2024
 
The Falls – Taiwan, 2021
 

While watching Chung Mong-hung’s 2021 film, The Falls, I was reminded of something one of my child development teachers remarked, that tears and anger are often the result of an accumulation of frustrating experiences – tough mornings, disagreements with friends, difficulty at work or school – not just the result of what has recently happened. However, there are times in history when the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back is so powerful and unexpected that it has the potential to send people spiraling into the abyss. For some people, Covid-19 was such an event, and The Falls is the first film I’ve seen that attempts to show the impact of the pandemic on both people’s personal and psychological states.
 
The Falls begins with a scene of dysfunction, one that I’m sure many people are unfortunately familiar with. It is a school day, and for Lo Pin Wen (Alyssa Chia), just getting her daughter up and out the door is a momentous task. It should be easier, of course. Her daughter, Xiao-Jing (Gingle Wang), is 18 and a senior in high school, yet their morning is filled with a string of unfeeling inquiries and caustic backtalk. And it only gets worse as the day goes on.
 
At work, Pin Wen receives a double whammy. First, there’s a rather heartless email requesting that all staff members decide how much of a “voluntary” pay cut they receive. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she is informed that one of her daughter’s classmates has tested positive for Covid, automatically triggering home quarantine for the entire class. Pin Wen offers to keep working, but her boss tells her to take some time off. It’s an understandable decision, but it deprives Pin Wen of the one thing that she needs to feel in control of the chaos surrounding her, and without it, her descent is rapid and severe.
 
The Falls could easily have focused solely on the ensuing two weeks, detailing what quarantine is like and how these characters deal with their unwanted joint confinement. Instead, it elects to pivot in a way that allows for Pin Wen and Xiao-Jing to switch roles. Covid gives way to mental illness, and Xiao-Jing must now effectively become the head of the household. Unfortunately, the change is too abrupt, and Xiao-Jing’s sudden maturity seems unexplained. This is a character who, while possibly infected, was so spiteful as to take off her mask while standing close to her mother and tell her to keep away, a move that can only be seen as an aggressive attempt to create both emotional and physical distance. To see her acting kind and responsible so quickly was more than a bit jarring.
 
Hurting the film more is its apparent desire for its characters to resolve problems with very little effort. Need your mother’s financial information? Just make an emotional plea to a bank employee. Have money problems? Just sell your house. Never mind that by your own admission the market is bad. Have low savings? Perhaps you too can live off of NT $40,000 (about US $1,300) a month. Writers Chung and Chang Yao-sheng seem to think that there are easy solutions to everything, and that they can be discovered and dealt with in less than ten minutes of screen time. The result is less a journey of discovery than a series of simple steps.
 
Perhaps the most egregious of these “simple steps” is the notion that people with mental illness can, with enough introspection and awareness, eventually diagnose the source of their problems themselves. Twice in the film characters detail sudden flashes of awareness when developments like those are much more likely to be the result of therapy and strenuous reflection. It is as if the spectre of A Beautiful Mind had somehow taken possession of the writers as they looked for another rapid resolution and made them make the following erroneous calculation, Well, if worked in A Beautiful Mind, it will work here. Fortunately, the scenes in which these revelations are divulged are quite moving, and like Nash, one of the characters has developed a somewhat realistic method of coping with something that she knows is not really there.
 
Other aspects of the film also ring true. Many of the companies most directly affected by the pandemic did in fact either reduce their staff or ask them to take pay cuts, despite already having what can only be considered extremely low salaries, and yes, many workers were indeed asked to choose how much of their salaries they would lose. Given that they were told that the alternative was job loss, was it really a choice, though? More importantly, periods of quarantine were not always times when families came together. Those that were already dysfunctional did not magically come together – For many people, there were more arguments, more drinking, more friction, and even suicidal thoughts. Thus, it is not surprising that Pin Wen and her daughter do not come together during their quarantine. Realistically, their journey takes much longer. Also, I admired the way the film slowly puts the pieces of the mother’s condition together. As a result, we get a remarkable understanding of what leads to Pin Wen’s decline.
 
Still, I can’t help thinking of The Falls as a compromised film. The idea behind it is a promising one, and the two lead characters are fascinating to watch. However, the film’s frequent shortcuts undercut the drama, robbing it of much needed momentum. A better film would have left difficulties unresolved for a time, adding them to other conflicts and raising the stakes for its characters. This one does not. A better film would also not have to rely on a shock ending to make its point, for in a family drama, what resonates is the final state of the family, and that point had already been made. In the end, The Falls is a good film, one about sympathetic characters coping with tragic circumstances. It had the potential to be great, though; it just lacked to attention span to pull it off. (on DVD in Region 3; on Netflix)
 
3 stars
 
*The Falls is in Taiwanese and Chinese with English subtitles.
*The Falls won Best Narrative Film at the 58^th Golden Horse Awards in 2021.