Chinese director Qiao Sixue has said that her debut feature is semi-autobiographical. Qiao studied film in France and intended to remain in Europe, but eventually returned to her childhood home in Inner Mongolia in order to make a movie about her mother, with whom she had always had a fraught relationship. In the movie, her avatar is Alus (Yider), a club musician who has achieved a level of success in Beijing by combining electronics with native Mongolian instruments he mastered as a child. In the big city he has essentially thrown off the trappings of his rural upbringing and remade himself as a vanguard artist, but then he hears from his brother that their mother, Naranzug (Badema), has descended into a state of dementia and has practically “destroyed” his urban household. Given that the brother has a family and Alus does not, Alus feels guilty and goes to his house to address his mother’s fervent desire to return to her real home, though it takes some time for him to determine exactly where this home is.

The film takes the form of a road movie, with the Mongolian steppe providing a dramatic background for Alus’s slow and painstaking reconsideration of his relationship with Naranzug, whose cognitive impairment becomes more acute along the way. The title refers obliquely to the colorful rope that Alus uses to connect him to Naranzug, who mostly doesn’t recognize him as her son, so as to prevent her from stumbling off into the vast, empty plains, but along the way it becomes a metaphor for the ties that bind him to his homeland as he discovers not only what it is about the place that made his mother the person she is, but also how much it has informed his own character. As Naranzug almost reverts to a feral state—at one point delivering a lost lamb back to the corral from which it wandered—Alus has to resort to a more primal form of care, playing his music in order to lure his mother back into his control. 

All the while, the idea of where Naranzug’s “home” is keeps shifting, and as the pair move further into the wilderness it becomes clear that home is more of an idea than a place. It’s the people they encounter, the smells and sounds that connect her with something she can still somehow recall; though in the end it’s a landmark she identifies from her childhood. Though the mysticism invoked by Qiao’s camerawork and sound design, not to mention the romance that Alus encounters along the way, occasionally trespasses into the realm of corn, Alus’s newly generated link to a culture he thought he knew but really didn’t is made palpable. When he joins in a grasslands festival by playing his own music, it doesn’t feel anachronistic or odd. His artistic sensibility has always been rooted in this place, and his mother reacts with pure joy, despite her affliction. The connection is complete, thus allowing them to let go of each other forever. 

In Mongolian and Mandarin. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku K’s Cinema (03-3352-2471).

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