Inertia implies stillness, but more precisely it means that without intervention any body resists change. The word conjures ceaseless motion as much as it does stasis—someone who cannot go on, or someone who can do nothing else. Something of this semantic tension imbues The Calming, writer-director Song Fang’s ascetic second feature. Lin (Qi Xi), also a filmmaker, neither works nor rests but drifts, boarding buses and trains, wandering verdurous forests and lamplit, unpeopled streets, across Tokyo, Niigata, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Nanjing. Now and then she sojourns with loved ones or promotes her latest film about trees: life forms that likewise commingle rootedness and sway. Images of trees bookend The Calming: first a digital still projected onto a gallery wall—Lin asks the technicians to dim the brightness, a cue to…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 85 - Winter 2021