Review by Beatrice On 27-Oct-2024
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."
Start from the end: You is arrested for stealing medicine and concealment.
She did everything for Zitai, over a year and a half of a relationship filled with love and death.
You is married to a violent man.
“Don’t ruin my makeup, the guests are still here.”
He hits her and gives the concert tickets, which his wife had so eagerly wanted, to the guests.
She doesn’t give up and meets a scalper, who has run out of tickets. Despite offering him a lot of money, he refuses and takes her to a place where she can watch the concert. The spot is uncomfortable, and he has to hold her by her legs to support her.
This surprising gesture of love and generosity from Tai moves her, even more so when she learns that he is terminally ill with stomach cancer.
Adapted from the eponymous 2003 novel by Li Xiuwen, it’s a story of love, an existential journey of endurance, complicity, and passion between Wuhan and bustling Shanghai.
You falls in love, leaves her comfortable life, and begins to follow her feelings, the rarefied magic that forms between the two of them.
Between eros and thanatos, life guides them into accepting mutual love with a pact: not to die before their time. Zitai must wait for a natural death now that someone cares for him. You loves him and wants to be by his side until the end.
The only condition she must fulfill is never to take him to the hospital, and he cannot die without sharing that moment with her.
Everything unfolds in a metropolis filled with lights, shows, travels, rain, baths, multidimensionality.
It’s a story with a poignant rhythm: between life and illness, physicality and spirituality, excitement and danger, nature and artifice, concentration and expansion, addition and subtraction.
“The relationship between Xu Zitai and Xia You in the film contrasts intimacy with vulnerability, social class, aesthetics, physical illness with emotional fragility,” explains the director. “It’s also a contrast between urban and rural settings, passion and loneliness, and these contrasts inevitably create tension.”
Bound in Heaven is a story showing a love so deep and so tested that it begs you to believe that love is life. “I didn’t set out to make a love story, although that’s its foundation. What I wanted to express was my understanding of humanity and destiny through a romantic relationship set in a specific era,” explains Huo Xin.
Time passes, and the deadline looms over a body exhausted by an industrial verticality, from where it seems possible to reach the sky, though the only real possibility is crashing down, while You walks away with a tearful, tormented smile.
An unconditional, extreme, irreplaceable love.
A sweeping drama: a film to restore credibility to life, albeit fragile and limited, to liberate from emotional prisons, to awaken the desire for time to conquer with what remains of life, to come to terms with the impending death.
I descended a million stairs, giving you my arm, and now that you are no longer here, there is emptiness at every step. Even so, our long journey was brief. Mine still continues, no longer needing appointments, reservations, traps, or the scorn of those who think reality is what they see. I descended millions of stairs with you, not because four eyes might see better. I descended with you because I knew that, of the two of us, the only real eyes, though so clouded, were yours.
27-Oct-2024 by Beatrice