‘Living the Land’ Review: Progress Takes Time In a Stirring, Season-Cycling Chinese Family Saga

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a patient, plainspoken poetry, neither overly earthy nor flowery, to “Living the Land,” a rolling rural drama that may be a work of pure fiction — but often feels wholly, organically observed, as if its storytelling were dictated by the rigors and challenges of seasons and soil.

An unassuming but impressive second feature from Chinese writer-director Huo Meng, the film deftly captures the pace of life in a modest farming village on the brink of industrialization in 1991: a steady meander, at once languid and arduous, that is felt differently across four generations of the hard-up Li family.

As the young restlessly await a future that arrives in frustrating fits and starts, the old slow down further, accepting that they’ve seen enough change for one lifetime.

Though it’s gently paced and narratively diffuse, “Living the Land” is never dull, thanks to a wealth of incident and the complexity of relationships in Huo’s extended family portrait — which shares its multi-generational breadth and vivid rooting in China’s central Henan province with the director’s 2018 debut “Crossing the Border — Zhaoguan.” That film was selected by leading auteur Jia Zhangke for a special showcase at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival; this more expansive and ambitious follow-up has been duly promoted to the same festival’s main competition this year, and promises to be more widely distributed than its predecessor.