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The Farewell is one giant feminist metaphor (and it’s fantastic)
You’re going to see “The Farewell” at the one indie theatre in town. After all, it’s important to support independent film and movie theatres that don’t frontload their films with 25 minutes of trailers blasted at a deafening volume. Of course it’s also important to vote with your dollars where majority minority casts are concerned. Lulu Wang’s film that premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Festival has all the marks of an art house film including subtitles and a cast of relative unknowns — including her own great aunt cast in a key role.
But this is no esoteric film. “The Farewell” is not the kind of gauzy motion picture that can only be unpacked over a lifetime of hypotheticals and epiphanies.
Wang wrote and directed this film based on her own family story, as told to This American Life in which news of a fatal diagnosis was withheld from the one person for whom it most pertained: her grandmother who was dying of cancer.
As much as “The Farewell” is steeped in Chinese traditions, East versus West cultural…
