Shot in New York and funded by the Spike Lee Fund When Winter Comes was directed by Chinese filmmaker Yuan Yuan. It is a film about a Chinese mother searching for her missing daughter. The film opens with her being asked to identify a drowned body. I’m pretty conclusive in thinking this is a film about grief, and a very clever one.
To touch on less harrowing aspects first: the sets in this short are gorgeous. The cool-toned colour grading didn’t go unnoticed, (Dare I say winter has come? Sorry.) The cold, concrete streets of New York are a big star of this show. Particularly in scenes where we watch Mrs Li (Eleven Lee) endlessly shuffle from lamppost to lamppost with her daughter’s missing posters.
The film uses sound wonderfully as a technical element. There are mentions that Jiyai, Mrs. Li’s daughter, loved music. When Mrs Li is cleaning her room, you know because she’s adamant she’s coming home, she comes across an ocarina and has this intimate kind of longing moment where she plays it.
The film avoids a score or soundtrack, relying only on two moments of playing Jiyai’s ocarina. When she’s playing it it’s shaky but it’s also innocent and altogether; just makes you feel hollow. It’s this feeble, lonely sound, both haunting and comforting. It’s particularly haunting in the non-diagetic instance we hear it. You may need to hear it to fully understand.
Eleven Lee is brilliant as Mrs Li. She portrays a grieving mother with so much stillness. The absence of over-emotive acting that makes her performance all the more hurtful. Mrs Li is not overly emphatic, she is deeply avoidant and that’s incredibly honest filmmaking.
When I labelled this a film about grief, I definitely looked at it as a manifestation of the denial phase. Drowning symbolism lingers and follows Mrs Li everywhere. There is a suspicious leak in her apartment. A discarded bucket of soapy-water. She glances introspectively at a fish tank and looks away as a dead fish floats belly-up to the surface. We learn that she has been avoiding the detective’s calls. Presumably this avoidance is to prolong or withdraw from finding out the results of a DNA report. The results of which would confirm her daughter has drowned.
The film has no real timeframe. However, it’s fair to say that significant time passes between the first scene, when Mrs. Li sees the body, and the film’s conclusion. That is a crucial part of why It’s final scene is so effective. I can’t overstate my love for the last scene, it’s truly haunting and is such a gorgeous visual of refusal. There’s so much shown in an act of repetition and a simple season change. How long can someone continue searching for a person who has already been found?
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