Search - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers on DVD

Ozu's sensibility applied to a fragmented Chinese-American f

Glenn E. Stambaugh | Carlisle, PA USA | 06/23/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"A widowed Chinese father visits America to see his daughter for the first time in years. For reasons we gradually discover in the course of the film, they are not close, and the daughter, having installed him in her apartment, spends more time away each day, politely avoiding discussing her life with him at all, keeping her emotional distance. We see the father, despite his broken English, take walks, strike up casual conversations with a few Americans, like an unemployed girl lounging by a pool in her bikini, who explains she wants to be a "forensic scientist," to which he replies he was a rocket scientist back in China, a claim we will find out a great deal more about later in the film. The father begins meeting an Iranian woman of his own age in a nearby park each day, discussing their respective family situations, which parallel each other in some unfortunate ways. Beginning to snoop on his daughter a bit, the father finds some surprising things about her life, but angers her in the process, which finally forces them to confront each other and attempt to right some misunderstandings. Sadly, they still cannot reconcile, and the daughter packs the father off on a tour for his remaining time in America, the movie ending as he asks her not to see him off, neither of them liking good-byes.

This movie shares some qualities with Ozu's best films from the early fifties, especially TOKYO STORY, not the visual style, but the intensely observed family dynamics. But here, in modern America, lacking extended families, Wang uses chance encounters with characters like the Iranian woman to achieve a less-profound but still emotionally moving effect."