Memories Look at Me

Remember Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon? The young woman who played Juliette Binoche’s child-minder was Song Fang, at the time a film student in Paris. Song is now back in China and this is her remarkable debut feature, a quasi-autobiographical account of a young woman visiting her aging parents in Nanjing and reflecting for the first time—through encounters with relatives, neighbours and friends—on what it means to grow old. And on how those left behind cope with losing someone, loved or resented, with whom they’ve spent much of their lives.

Song herself plays the young woman and almost everyone else plays themselves, but Memories Look at Me is not at all a documentary. On the contrary, it’s a very precise, very carefully calibrated account of family ties, binds and losses. There’s no music (instead, superb sound design by Yamashita Aya), no sentimentality, no melodrama. Just a moving and clear-sighted vision of feelings, spoken and unspoken. As you might expect, it’s especially sensitive to the experiences and emotions of women.

— Tony Rayns