Under the Bridge [大桥下面] (1984)

‘Stop living in the pain of the past’

Qin Nan [Gong Xue] is a tailor working in the street neat her Shanghai apartment in the early 1980s (near Suzhou river). Her neighbour Gao Zhihua [Zhang Tielin] works close beside her and, encouraged by his mother [Wang Pin], starts to take an interest in Nan.

But Nan makes mysterious trips to Suzhou every month and we later discover that this is to visit her 5 year old son Dongdong who lives with relatives near Suzhou.

When he becomes sick, Nan takes him back to live with her and his Grandfather. This leads to a lot of gossip and backbiting as she is an unmarried mother. Auntie Gao strats to take a different view of the desirability of marriage. But Zhuhua stands his ground and eventually his mother comes round.

Like Why was I born? this is another ‘social problem’ movie extolling the need to move away from ‘old-fashioned’ attitudes and to recognise people like Nan and her child (at least where they have not engaged in real ‘immorality’).  In a side story, Zhihua’s friend’s sister Xiaoyun [Xin Yin] is disabled due to polio. Both Nan and Zhihua separately support her.  And there is a plea for the value of self-employment (as opposed to State employment).

The Cultural Revolution is always in the background: Nan’s father was targeted during the period and her mother committed suicide as a result. Nan was a sent-down youth as, it emerges, was the father of her child. Xiaoyun ‘s mother was targeted as a rightist and her father ‘went mad’.

The film shows the challenges of the new opening up period as one character is sent to labour camp after being caught in a stolen car racket while another’s girlfriend loses interest in him due to his uncertain income.

This film is a small step away from ‘old-fashioned’ mindsets but still very much a work in progress. Lots of shots of an almost unrecognisable Shanghai.