French director-writer Philippe Muyl serves up satisfying feel-good drama in The Nightingale
Muyl gets back to nature in The Nightingale, where an elderly Beijing resident takes his pet singing bird on a trip to his home village of Yangshuo to have it sing at his wife's grave.
In 2002, French director-writer Philippe Muyl offered up The Butterfly, a feel-good drama about an elderly widower who takes his pre-teen latchkey kid neighbour on a once-in-a-lifetime excursion to find a rare butterfly.
A decade later, Muyl smoothly transposes several thousand kilometres east his tale of an old man who bonds with a young urbanite after they spend time communing with nature. In doing so, he shows that certain humanist stories can resonate across what may appear to be widely disparate cultures.
Shot largely in rural Guangxi province, The Nightingale centres on an elderly Beijing resident who decides to take his pet singing bird on a trip to his home village of Yangshuo to have it sing at his wife's grave. Forced to go along for the long ride is his pampered granddaughter, whom he has to babysit because her high-flying architect father is away on a business trip, her jet-setting mother is headed off to Paris and the family helper, with whom the child was to have been left, is taking leave to attend her son's wedding.
The second official French-mainland co-production made since the signing of a 2010 film treaty (with Wang Xiaoshuai's 2011 coming-of-age film 11 Flowers being the first), this charming 2013 road movie is the closing film of the cinema portion of this year's Le French May.
But even with the Lille-born Muyl at its helm, The Nightingale could be regarded as a largely Chinese film, as it features a predominantly Putonghua-speaking cast and crew and was filmed almost entirely within China's borders.
Among those doing sterling work behind the camera is cinematographer Sun Ming, whose gorgeous rendering of rural landscapes and village settings recall those found in Huo Jianqi's lyrical Postmen in the Mountains (1999), which was shot in neighbouring Hunan province. Veteran actor Li Baotian (Ju Dou; Shanghai Triad) ably anchors the film as Zhu Zhigen, the affable grandfather who's hard not to adore even after he gets lost in the forest and ends up having to spend the night in a cave with his bird and his young granddaughter.