Bing Liu, the writer/director born in China until his family moved him to the United States when he was five, has a Best Documentary Oscar nomination for his 2018 feature “Minding the Gap,” about male skateboarders in Rockford, Illinois.
His narrative feature debut, “Preparation for the Next Life,” is produced by Orion Pictures and Plan B, from Brad Pitt, Jeremy Kleiner, and Dede Gardner — all following a similar path as Oscar-nominated docmaker RaMell Ross’ own narrative feature debut “Nickel Boys,” also produced by Orion and Plan B, and also set up at Amazon/MGM Studios, and also a literary adaptation of an acclaimed novel. So why the hell is the studio burying Liu’s film with a September 5 release date in the middle of fall festival season, and without sending it to any festivals?
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The bittersweet immigrant love story at its core — starring cutie-pie it-boy Fred Hechinger (“The White Lotus,” “Thelma,” “Gladiator II”) as an army veteran and wildly promising discovery Sebiye Behtiyar as an undocumented Sebiye Uyghur woman, arriving in New York City amid great peril and pain — is as seemingly doomed as the movie’s release strategy. Director Liu more than uncannily follows in Ross’ footsteps, which led to a Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay nominations for “Nickel Boys”: Liu also worked as a camera assistant on fiction series and films outside his nonfiction efforts, bringing to “Preparation for the Next Life,” based on Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel, a sophisticated visual sense.
That’s even if the movie is uneven dramatically, weighed down by traumas and break-ups and breakdowns in the later stretches, and with too many shots of Aishe (Uyghur) jogging toward her future. Those scenes, long tracking shots held by cinematographer Ante Cheng’s camera, don’t tell us anything about Aishe other than how her soldier father, back in the Chinese province of Xinjiang she escaped where the Uyghur ethnic minority is persecuted, instilled in her a commitment to exercise and physical strength that becomes part of her preparations for the next life. If they tell us anything, it’s to literalize how she’s running from her past.
But the film’s occasionally clumsy symbolism and sputtered drama aren’t a reason to write off the film. On the contrary, “Preparation for the Next Life” is a promising narrative debut that also harnesses Liu’s established bona fides as a documentary director. His observant approach to capturing the sights and sounds of New York’s Chinatown and Lower East Side — the streets packed with extras, the kitchens where Aishe works steaming and bustling — displays what can only be a documentarian’s attention to local detail and color.
Skinner is back in the United States, and in New York City with nothing but a backpack and baggie of anti-anxiety meds, after yet another tour of duty in the Middle East, and clearly dealing with undiagnosed PTSD and self-medicating with alcohol. Meanwhile, though Aishe speaks Mandarin and English (the latter a slight update from Lish’s novel, in which her English vocabulary is limited), she is treated even by the landlord operating the Lower East Side hovel she’s renting week after week as an outsider because she is Muslim. We get flashes of her perilous journey as a refugee from China to the United States, more so than is offered of Skinner’s past, which he prefers not to divulge either. He spends much of his time on benders.
Martyna Majok’s script would not work on the screen without the chemistry between Behtiyar (an actress wise for her years and lack of professional experience) and Hechinger, who fall fast in love all over New York City after a very only-in-the-movies encounter, in Times Square hotels and in a McDonald’s or in the threadbare apartment Skinner rents, but are ultimately too damaged and from too disparate of cultural backgrounds to make it work. A late-breaking confrontation between the actors amid Skinner’s escalating alcohol dependency is capably played by Behtiyar and Hechinger, in a film that has previously avoided overdramatics or sentimentality. A piano-driven score from “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” composer Emile Mosseri rings in your head long after the movie is over, a thing of true beauty. The cinematography is also up there with the year’s best.
In a span of entire completed films evaporating off studios’ rosters faster than a Titanic-bound submersible, does Amazon/MGM Studios want to be known as a corporation that treats artists similarly? “Preparation for the Next Life” begins a quiet release this weekend, and it doesn’t feel like the studio is supporting it. There’s an audience for this film, for those who like their romances unsentimental and spare, politically conscious without overheaping the messaging. It’s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.
Grade: B-
Amazon/MGM Studios releases “Preparation for the Next Life” in theaters Friday, September 5.
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