The topic of how to address an elderly parent’s impending death is common in Asian arthouse cinema, and there are very few new angles from which to approach it. Chinese director Chen Xiaoyu’s debut feature, Gone With the Boat, takes matters slowly and cautiously, and while it’s affecting in its own quiet way it doesn’t make any kind of distinct impression. The elderly person in question is 72-year-old Zhou Jin (Ge Zhaomei), who has lived by herself in a riverside village since her carpenter husband recently died and seems entirely self-sufficient. She has two adult children, the tense, ambitious Jenny (Liu Dan), who runs an English language school in Shanghai with her American husband; and Qin (We Zhoukai), who doesn’t seem to have any kind of fixed job or residence. They rarely visit their mother, and when they do they don’t stay long. But once Jin is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor they are forced to face their filial responsibilities and be by her side, choices that invariably lead to friction, not only with their mother, but with each other.

Initially the conflict is over their mother’s treatment. Jenny wants Jin to take advantage of aggressive methods, but Jin sees it as being pointless and would prefer dying at home. Qin takes his mother’s side, and the two siblings alternate staying with Jin as she enters her final weeks, though Jenny’s school is having serious financial problems that demand her attention. Qin has no such obstacles and nothing better to do, and so he spends the bulk of his time with Jin. Gradually, Chen reveals the source of the family’s troubled interrelationships. There was an older son who died young, plunging his parents into remorse over how they forced him to take over the father’s business, and so they encouraged their two later children to go out into the world. Moreover, Jin was either orphaned or given up by her parents to an adoptive family, who expected her to marry their son when she was old enough, but wed another instead. Consequently, she has never had a family to fall back on—her adoptive brother visits, intent on putting Jin’s affairs in order, but she rejects his help—and has only her children, grandchildren, and the house she made into a home. She wants a simple funeral, a wish that perplexes her neighbors. 

Chen does a good job of weaving these various personal enmities into a believable family saga, and maintains enough mystery to keep the viewer intrigued. Qin seems to have a constitutional repulsion to marriage (it’s hinted he might be gay); and Jenny is estranged from her older teenage son, who left school and home to pursue a career as an actor, with the implication that his father is not the same man as the father of Jenny’s younger daughter, Sue. As a leitmotif, the director makes frequent references to the boats required by residents of the village, as if they provided more stability than an actual house. It’s an odd metaphor for a movie that’s so formally stolid and narratively inert. 

Thai director Pat Boonnitipat’s How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is, as suggested by its title, a less serious movie about the same subject, though in its own way it really isn’t that different. Opening in a comic mode with various family members kissing up to their widowed matriarch, Grandma Menju (Usha “Taew” Seamkhum), who owns a nice piece of property in the Chinatown section of Bangkok, the story sets up a classic cynical dilemma: Who deserves to inherit her legacy? From the get-go it appears that the least likely benefactor would be her college dropout grandson, M (Putthipong “Billkin” Assaratanakul), whose interest in life starts and ends with his collection of video games. Boonnitipat’s aims are made clear by how he presents the various family members. Everyone, including M’s parents, cousins (one of whom makes a living through Only Fans), uncles, and aunts, present themselves as worthy heirs. Grandma, who is good-natured to a fault, takes it all in stride. M has designs, but he keeps them hidden.

Invariably, the other shoe drops and M tells Grandma that she has cancer, a diagnosis everyone else has kept hidden from her. Impressed by his candor, Grandma takes more interest in M to her other relatives’ chagrin, and M moves in as a full-time caregiver. For a time, M’s mercenary mission seems obvious, especially to the other family members, but as he gets closer to Grandma and learns her story he inadvertently sees what kind of a world exists beyond the computer screen and can’t help but get caught up in it. Consequently, he draws closer to Grandma than either of her own two children, M’s striving mother Sew (Sarinrat “Jear” Thomas) and gambling-addicted Uncle Kiang (Sanya “Duu” Kunakurn). 

Boonnitipat uses M’s naivete to show the audience this world, which is not that different from the one conveyed in Gone With the Boat, but the director expresses a much keener enthusiasm for his images and sounds, and the movie makes this corner of the Thai capital, with its rich ethnic heritage and unique history, vivid and fascinating. Though predictably sentimental—it is one of the decade’s highest-grossing films not only in Thailand but throughout Southeast Asia—it’s also rigorously honest about the process of dying slowly. We know M will somehow reap the inheritance his relatives covet, but by actually being present, emotionally as well as physically, he realizes what that legacy is worth and acts conscientiously, not only toward his grandmother, but to everyone else in his family, whether they like it or not.

Gone With the Boat, in Chinese and English, now playing in Tokyo at Grand Cinema Sunshine Ikebukuro (03-6915-2722).

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, in Thai, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Gone With the Boat home page in Japanese

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies home page in Japanese

Gone With the Boat photo (c) 2023 Fractal Star Film Production Co., Ltd., Infinina Media Co., Ltd.

How to Make Millions Before Granma Dies photo (c) 2024 GDH 559 Co., Ltd.