Chinese Landscape Painting Film Series Will Run to a Fourth Installment, Says ‘First Taste of Loneliness’ Director Gu You (EXCLUSIVE)

Chinese filmmaker Gu You‘s films modeled on Chinese landscape painting will not stop at three.

The director of “The First Taste of Loneliness,” which world premiering in competition at the Busan International Film Festival, tells Variety that a fourth installment is already in research and development, and that it may lean toward genre.

The new film follows three generations of women who face loneliness for the first time after the death of a much-loved father. Zhou Xun, Xi Meijuan and Wang Shengdi star. Losange Films handles international sales on the China-France coproduction, which Hangzhou Shanshui Films produced with France’s Tandem Films. Tandem will also release it in France. Shan Zuolong and Du Kexin produced, and Gu wrote the screenplay with Yang Yikun.

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Gu, who was credited as Gu Xiaogang on “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains,” had envisioned three films when he made that first entry. He says that while making the second, he realized “this is a topic that requires continuous exploration – what the relationship between landscape and cinema truly is. It’s so difficult, extraordinarily difficult.”

The next film might not be purely art-house, he says, and could take on elements of romance, the road movie or suspense.

“Overall, even though I’ve completed three films, I feel as though I am only just beginning – truthfully, just beginning,” Gu says. “It feels like I’ve only grasped a tiny fragment of the relationship between cinema and landscape.”

“Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” played Cannes Critics’ Week in 2019 and became the first Chinese-language film to close the section. Its follow-up, “Dwelling by the West Lake,” competed at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2023 and opened the Beijing International Film Festival the following year. Gu received the Kurosawa Akira Award, becoming its youngest recipient.

“The First Taste of Loneliness” begins with a death in the family. Gu’s wife’s father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer not long after the couple met, and he died a year after they married.

“Precisely because my wife faced the passing of her father, she was forced to consciously contemplate death and the meaning of life, which in turn drew me into this same process of reflection,” Gu says.

The film takes its title from a Teresa Teng song that plays toward the end.

“When one is young, loneliness might be about romance and love; then, just like after my wife lost her father, loneliness becomes about parting, life, and death,” he says.

One line in the film holds that every encounter with loneliness is the first step toward happiness. The film also draws on the Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo, who compared a human life to a wild swan landing on melting snow, its feet touching both snow and mud.

“Snow represents the beautiful parts of life, while mud represents loneliness, the seemingly bad or unfortunate parts. Together, they constitute life,” Gu says.

He also points to the Buddhist idea that affliction is itself enlightenment, and to the lotus, which roots in mud and blooms above clear water.

“Clear water seems good and mud seems bad, but inherently neither is good nor bad; both are necessary elements that enable our lives to bloom with meaning,” he says.

Another strand of the story follows Gui Zhi, a widow played by Xi Meijuan, who begins a new relationship, and the friction that causes at home. Gu notes that China, like Japan and South Korea, has become an aging society, so the situation is common. Adult children vary widely in how they respond, and their reaction can depend on whether it is a father or a mother who has found a new partner.

“Overall, in China, this is still tied to traditional emotions and remains a matter that requires parents and children to spend time communicating,” he says.

Gu wonders whether the same is true in Korea. “For instance, I watched Hong Sang-soo’s ‘Claire’s Camera,’ and in France, this didn’t seem to be an issue at all. So Europeans watching a subject like this might find it somewhat trivial or sentimental, but indeed in the East, it currently remains relatively conservative.”

What ties the films together, in Gu’s view, is first a matter of form. His long takes, which he likens to the unrolling of a scroll, come straight from landscape painting.

“This may not be very familiar to international audiences, because traditional Chinese painting is a highly specialized art form; even domestic Chinese audiences might not fully grasp the relationship between landscape paintings and cinema,” he says.

The second link is philosophical: the films use older Chinese thought to look at present-day questions of life, death and loneliness. Gu’s hometown sits on the Fuchun River, where the painting that gave the first film its name was made more than 600 years ago. Looking back at that film’s handling of time and space, he says, “I realized it wasn’t deliberate; it naturally stemmed from living in such a city, forming that inherent perspective on space and time.” The new film is set in Hangzhou in East China.

Gu and cinematographer Takimoto Mikiya laid down six rules before the shoot, starting with the idea that every shot should work like a scene in a painting. The finished film runs to just over 50 shots. Many of the longer ones could have been stitched together digitally, but Gu chose to capture them for real.

“But if an audience watches this film and I tell them a shot was fabricated with CG, I feel like I’d be cheating them,” Gu says. “The raw power of the actors’ performances and the purity of cinematography would instantly diminish.”

He uses AI for office tasks, calls it a convenient tool and believes in embracing new technology in daily life. “Precisely because we live in this era, we want to return to the core essence of cinema, exploring the foundational language of film itself. We want to tell audiences: this was captured in reality,” he says.

Casting presented its own problem. “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” used non-professional actors who could blend into real locations unnoticed. Here, Gu cast Zhou Xun and Xin Baiqing, both instantly recognizable to Chinese audiences.

For scenes shot in public spaces, including one in a hospital, the crew set up cameras well in advance and at a distance. Some takes worked and many did not, and once bystanders spotted the stars, word spread quickly. “So if an attempt failed, we had to rewrite the scene, change the location, and film somewhere else entirely so people wouldn’t know we were shooting. That’s how we pulled off this seemingly impossible challenge, preserving authentic realism,” Gu says.

He barely needed to direct Zhou, he says.

“Sitting there, I felt like I was appreciating a master at work – she truly is a master, especially with such long takes. We call it ‘acting without acting,'” Gu says. Reviewing the footage again and again, he never caught her slipping out of character. “She appears simply to be living life, yet delicately conveys every nuance of emotion required,” he says.

Busan runs through Oct. 15.

“Naturally, we first look forward to how audiences in Busan and across the world receive this film, but personally, I am already looking ahead to the next chapter,” Gu says.