What “The Farewell” Has to Say About Western Involvement with China

One of the most celebrated of this year’s films has been The Farewell, a small-budget independent movie made by the young Chinese-American director Lulu Wang. Tipped for the 2019 Oscars, it has received critical panegyrics in most leading U.S. media outlets (the Wall Street Journal: “funny, emotionally intricate”) and was the subject of no fewer than four lengthy and laudatory pieces in the New York Times. It was also a major hit at the annual film festival in my hometown of Jerusalem.

The Farewell is indeed an unusually intelligent as well as emotionally engaging movie. Its scenes have that rare quality of bursting continually into one’s consciousness for days after viewing it, evoking thoughts deeper than one’s initial impression and revealing an artful coherence between the film’s tiniest details and its largest ideas.

Yet, for me, this process of dawning awareness has been a disconcerting one, not unlike the National Basketball Association’s recently dawning awareness of the complexities of its lucrative relations with the People’s Republic.