in the film The waterfall from Netflix’s Chung Mong-hong, pain and emotional distance is everything. The Taiwanese filmmaker’s plot is obsessed with the small and subtle ruptures of emotional ties. Before, the director delved into his elegant style in wide-ranging, character-filled dramas. In his renowned the sun that burns 2019, Chung Mong-hong reflected on emotional stress through a set of stories.
In The waterfall, the filmmaker took a more complicated direction and analyzes the suffering of breakups primordial, from the delicate and small. The change allows you to explore and move into unknown regions of life together. But especially, exploring loneliness through a series of brilliant narrative resources. It does so using the first months of isolation of the pandemic health emergency as a background. The result is a journey through unusual themes, which right now seem more relevant than ever. Especially when they elaborate and support a version about coexistence, love and forgiveness that are moving due to their relevance.
For Chung Mong-hong, the unease of intimate relationships that are broken, transformed and modulated are silent processes. Often of rare beauty, but also related to our ability to accept the mistakes and imperfections of those we love. And it is that quality to show the power of subtle feelings that makes The waterfall an amazing story.
Especially when the director builds a reinterpretation on a timeless idea that could happen anywhere in the world. What happens when an emotional bond must be transformed out of necessity? What makes emotions become more and more elaborate, complex and, in the end, painful?
The small and painful stories in the middle of an emergency
In the film, the relationship between Pin-Wen (Alyssa Chia) and her teenage daughter Xiao Jing (Gingle Wang) is everything. The director analyzes the conflicts between the two as a kind of much larger idea, which meditates on loneliness. It is this perception that intersects the condition of good and evil with something deeper.
The confrontations, discussions, misunderstandings and in the end, the perception of the changing human nature, make of The waterfall a mosaic of questions. After all, what happens between the two women seems to be a reflection of what happens beyond the domestic. With the world confined and emotional relationships turned into borders, pain, anger and, in the end, love, manifests itself differently.
It also does so through a careful transit about the current individual. Quarantine forced a good number of people around the world to rethink their emotional ties. To agree on new limits of coexistence and deepen in the midst of the emergency towards new mutual views.
The waterfall not only shows that transformation, but gives it a new place and considerable emotional relevance. What might have been a careful but simple walk through the terrors and the new normal becomes somewhat more complex. Specifically, when the director asks himself hard questions about identity and the world of feelings.
Time and time again, the director gets his characters to exchange their perceptions of reality with each other. The relationship, which at the beginning of the film is presented as practical and almost immediate, becomes more dense. And with it, the way mother and daughter look at each other. Years of silence unresolved grudges, half-baked arguments. Everything emerges while coexistence becomes closer and almost claustrophobic. From a middle-aged woman who better understands the mental transits of her daughter, to a young woman who patiently looks at adulthood. The waterfall manages to create a space to reflect on who we are and who we become in the midst of unprecedented situations.
La Cascada: an unexpected late revival
And it is perhaps because of that unexpectedly current look that the film has become a curious hit on Netflix. A year after being included in the platform’s catalog, the film arouses renewed interest. Is it due to the way in which it orders, analyzes and deepens in subjects that are rarely meditated aloud? As much of the world tries to regain a measure of normality, the consequences of isolation and quarantine are beginning to be visible. How is the emotional world of those who went through the pandemic? What are the new limits of intimacy, the emotional and the intellectual?
Chung Mong-hong’s waterfall answers, perhaps unintentionally, the questions. And that intimate version of the world that survived an unprecedented crisis, the high point of a powerful film.