Chinese film Nightingale’ hits sweet note The key to happiness and a full life in modern China seems to be, to paraphrase Timothy Leary, turn off, tune out, drop in. Turn off the iPad, tune out the music by removing your headphones and drop in to what’s going on around you. At least, that’s the message of “The Nightingale,” a sweetly affecting Chinese film about a elderly man who opens his spoiled granddaughter to the analog world during a road trip across rural China. Not only do they rarely see each other, they spend little time with their 10-year-old latchkey daughter, Renxing (Xin Yi Yang), who is being raised, essentially, by the maid, her iPad and iPhone, and not necessarily in that order. When the maid leaves town for her son’s wedding and both parents are headed abroad for business, they have no choice but to send Renxing to travel with her grandfather Zhu Zhigen (Baotian Li, star of Zhang Yimou’s 1989 film “Ju Dou”), who is making a pilgrimage back to the rural village where Chongyi was raised. [...] Li’s quiet strength as the grandfather grounds the film in a gentle, simple and appealing way. [...] he or she might find the prospect of a road trip without a properly functioning Apple product to be a “Hunger Games”-like postapocalyptic nightmare.
#TBT
