{"id":878134,"date":"2026-10-11T03:10:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T03:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/878134\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T03:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T03:10:09","slug":"the-first-taste-of-loneliness-review-an-affecting-bereavement-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/878134\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The First Taste of Loneliness’ Review: An Affecting Bereavement Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe most moving scene in \u201cThe First Taste of Loneliness<\/a>\u201d is not, in fact, its most tear-streaked. Gu You<\/a>\u2018s heartfelt family portrait opens on an extended, anguished scene of three women \u2014 a mother, her daughter and her granddaughter \u2014 keeping vigil at the bedside of their beloved husband, father and grandfather as his longtime battle with pancreatic cancer comes to a close. Emotions run high and loud; the camera peers closely into their grief. But it\u2019s a quieter, more composed moment a little later that really jabs at the heart. A short time after her father\u2019s death, Yue (Zhou Xun) opens the final jar of his famous homemade pickles, tastes them, and with the bittersweet knowledge that she\u2019ll never get to do so again, declares it a good batch.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe First Taste of Loneliness\u201d is best when focused on such small but important everyday details. Its portrayal of the immediate, intense pain of mourning can be overwrought, but the bulk of this admittedly overlong film is given over to a more patient, restrained and gracefully observed study of how life reshapes itself around an absence \u2014 as Yue, her mother Luna (Xi Meijuan) and her teenage daughter Moon (Wang Shengdi) deal with the sadness, the relief and the faint sense of betrayal that comes from carrying on, while keeping space for the dead man\u2019s spirit in their respective lives. <\/p>\n

\n\tShot and structured with grand-scale elegance to counter the intimacy of the storytelling, this is a stirring final entry in Gu\u2019s \u201cLandscape\u201d trilogy, which began with his Cannes-premiered 2019 debut \u201cDwelling in the Fuchun Mountains\u201d and continued with 2023\u2019s \u201cDwelling by the West Lake\u201d \u2014 the three films connected not directly by characters or narratives but a shared style of melancholic family portraiture. Premiering in the main competition at the Busan Film Festival<\/a>, \u201cLoneliness\u201d again demonstrates the filmmaker\u2019s formal prowess, with its preponderance of ambitiously floating pans and heavily populated setpieces. It has a broader, more populist streak than its predecessors, which could net it greater global distribution, but has its artistic downsides: An overreliance on stickily emotive ballads to unnecessarily articulate the characters\u2019 feelings is a particular debit. <\/p>\n

\n\tSomewhat heavily expository dialogue informs us that Yue, formerly a fashion director in Beijing, has recently returned with Moon to the family apartment in the city of Hangzhou in southeast China. Home to Luna and her late husband for decades, it\u2019s a roomy, rambling space with spectacular views of the Qiantang River and, in Zhou Xingyu\u2019s excellent production design, a storied buildup of clutter. Mikiya Takimoto\u2019s camera lingers affectionately on stacked bookshelves \u2014 not even old cassette tapes have been thrown away \u2014 and desktops heavy with ornaments, notes and photographs that reveal in shorthand a life rich in love. Even in death, the man maintains a palpable presence in the home.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it may be time for at least some remnants of the past to make way for the present. Luna implores Yue, recently divorced, not to get stuck in a holding pattern, either in her career or her relationships \u2014 but Luna, too, needs to make some changes. She tentatively accepts the romantic advances of another man, Xu (Xu Chaoying), opening herself to a kind of happiness she\u2019d largely forgotten how to feel. Moon, meanwhile, is struggling at school but on the precipice of adulthood; as the young woman begins to make her own decisions in life, Yue must relinquish a degree of maternal responsibility. <\/p>\n

\n\tWritten by Gu with Yang Yikun, the screenplay, delicately braids these three arcs in such a way that each woman\u2019s new freedoms complement the others\u2019, while Takimoto\u2019s bravura camerawork \u2014 painting in watercolor shades of misty gray and mossy green \u2014 often physically connects their stories in languid, widely swooping movements. And while the three leads\u2019 performances are sensitively synched, Xi Meijuan is especially poignant as a widow trying to maintain a level of grieving decorum while embracing fresh experiences and sources of joy: A lovely scene of her and Xu dancing with other couples in a public square hits just the right note of romantic sentimentality tempered with elegiac sorrow. If \u201cThe First Taste of Loneliness\u201d hits overly maudlin notes elsewhere \u2014 literally so, in the case of Sylvian Wang\u2019s plaintive, piano-heavy score \u2014 it never feels cynical or manufactured in its emotions. Its moments of overstatement are entirely human, en route to a lighter, softer state of serenity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The most moving scene in \u201cThe First Taste of Loneliness\u201d is not, in fact, its most tear-streaked. Gu…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":878135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[100522,88,369322,206,369323],"class_list":["post-878134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-busan-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-gu-you","tag-movies","tag-the-first-taste-of-loneliness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/878135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}