BY CLEO LI-SCHWARTZ
This review is part of a series of reflections on Chinese films presented by the 2025 Beijing International Film Festival.
Korean-Chinese director Lu Zhang’s 2023 film The Shadowless Tower (白塔之光), screened in May in London, covers a lot of ground, literally and figuratively. It’s a film which criss-crosses the lives and secret wounds of three generations of multiple families, and whose geographic sweep (at least referentially) encompasses the northern Chinese ocean town of Beidahe, Beijing, Tibet, Guangdong, Korea, and New Zealand.
The film also very self-consciously pays homage to Beijing, both to the city’s joys and its melancholies. The film’s protagonist, Gu (Xin Baiqing), is an erstwhile poet turned melancholic middle-aged food critic. Divorced, he is a loving but often absent-minded father to his young daughter Xiao Xiao (笑笑，translated as “Smiley” in the English subtitling). Xiao Xiao lives with Gu’s sister and brother-in-law, and thus her father becomes a visitor to “her” home. As will become clear, dueling notions of home mark a common theme across the film’s plot threads. Gu hasn’t seen his own father in 40-something years, after his mother kicked him out of the house for (possibly) assaulting someone on a bus. Like many conversations in this film, alcohol blurs the details. Gu’s brother-in-law digs up Old Gu’s address; he is living a quiet hermit’s life in Beidahe.
Simultaneously, Gu crosses paths in Beijing with a chirpy but acerbic young photographer who styles herself “Bei Hua” （北化, Northern Flower) and whose real name is Ouyang Wenhui (as Gu tells her, she has the same names as his childhood hero, Ouyang Hai, a PLA soldier, and his sister, whose name is Wenhui). Bei Hua tells him that her hometown is the very same Beidahe where his father now resides – although as it turns out, for her, too, home is a more complicated business altogether. She grew up in an orphanage in Beidahe and was adopted by a family in Guangdong all the way down south at age 5. It is through Beihua that the film’s evocative portrayal of its protagonist emerges, but she herself is constructed as a perfect mirror for his worries, possessing just the right amount of probing quirkiness to draw him out. Nevertheless, actress Huang Yao manages to turn out an engaging performance as this manic pixie dream girl who possesses both sharpness and softness.
The film traces Gu’s nuanced network of interpersonal relations, though his reckoning with his long-lost father clearly looms the largest. It’s a stylishly shot, ambitious endeavour, but despite its over 2 hour and 20 minute runtime, seems in many respects to skim the surface of many of the interpersonal relationships it seeks to plumb and the motifs it seeks to encompass.
Layered, complicated revelations of various characters’ pasts and emotional secrets aren’t given time and space to land and breathe before the film cuts to yet another set of relations and revelations; for example, after only appearing in one previous scene, one of Gu’s female classmates shows up to drop a bombshell about her romantic past with another classmate, and then informs Gu that said classmate has just killed himself in Paris. Other tangential characters flit vaguely on and off screen; Gu’s ex-wife and her tragedy appears only towards the very end of the film’s run-time, and a friend of Beihua’s appears twice to deliver key information. Perhaps this reflects Zhang’s desire to capture life in its all fragmentation and randomness, but the evocation of the central plotline – the pathos of Gu’s severed relationship with his father, and its possible renewal – suffers as a result.
Where the film soars are the moments where Zhang takes his time and lets us peer into the lives of his characters. For example, in an especially moving sequence, Xiao Xiao reads Shi Zhi’s poem “This is Beijing at 4:08” (这是四点零八分的北京) as a voiceover while the camera follows her grandfather’s solitary routine as he wends his way through Beidahe. Similarly, its Beijing sequences are beautifully shot, particularly the sequences in which Gu and Bei Hua wander through Beijing’s hutongs, getting to know one another by degrees. Zhang frequently frames his characters standing or sitting in squares set within the rectangle of the screen, or contemplating one another and the world through mirrors, windows, and their pond-side reflections. The mise-en-scène of this world is lovely, as is its interweaving of words from literary figures with a relationship to Beijing, although these too often have a dark edge, such as the film’s two references to Gu Cheng (顾城), the Misty poet who ultimately killed both his wife and himself in New Zealand.
Throughout, the film tenderly ruminates on the colour white and its many associations. White is the colour of hospitals, of death, of Gu’s gloomy bachelor pad, and of course, of mourning. Yet it is also the colour of snow, and of the Buddhist pagoda near Gu’s place, which gives the film its title and plays an outsize symbolic role in its construction. Towards the beginning of the film, Gu tells Baihua a local story about this tower; because of its unusual shape, it seemingly casts no shadow at any time of day. Yet, some say it does possess a longer shadow – one that might be only visible in the distance, as far away as Tibet, its spiritual home. While open to interpretation, the tower’s physical and symbolic presence in the film seems to suggest that the past, while seemingly evanescent, can cast long, delayed shadows whose contours only become visible far into the future. And perhaps, that even the bonds seemingly severed by the passage of time and the course of human events can once again be reconstituted. In the final moments of the film, this poignant notion is stunningly visualised.
About the author
Cleo Li-Schwartz is an editor, writer, and MPhil student in Chinese Literature at the University of Cambridge. She was previously Associate Editor at The Washington Quarterly and China Reporting Assistant at Grid News.