sneersnipe film review

We Went to Wonderland Guo Xiaolu UK 2008

When most people’s parents come to stay a normal person might clean up the house and try to conform to a few dusty decade old conventions. Not Guo Xiaolu. Easily one of the UK’s most exciting new-ish filmmakers, her last feature How is My Fish Today was a narrative busting journey through China both geographically and stylistically. So when her parents come to visit her in London she records their reaction to the West, or Wonderland as they initially refer to it and makes a film out of it – We Went to Wonderland.

Pretty much acting like anybody’s crotchety old folks throughout, the fun of the piece lies in the interplay between the different values: as old people and as the generation that endured Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mother wants to go home; father is genuinely interested in the West despite being unable to speak after an operation. An amusing encounter with a park ranger in a Lea Valley park leads them to wonder whether all British parks have their own police force. Or just watching them hanging around a London flat, totally out of their element with cupboards full of English staples like marmite, causes merriment. The charm wears off after a while, well ahead of the end, but it’s fun while it lasts.

However gently humorous it may be, We Went to Wonderland is mildly troubling for an audience. For every mild scrape Guo Xiaolu’s parents encounter the thought occurs that they’ve lived through tumultuous change in China such as the Cultural Revolution. Her father spent ten years in a re-education camp for being seen as an intellectual. Unsurprisingly then that he reacts like a fish out of water on his first trip to the West. It’s completely natural to laugh at an old couple failing to cope with modern life and complaining to their daughter about it, yet behind it all is all this hurt.

Shot with a remarkable sense of intimacy, Guo Xiaolu used the film function on a tiny stills digital camera to shoot her film. One scene on a London railway platform is incredible in how subtle it is. Observing her parents simply waiting and wondering where the train is, it’s amazing that some teenagers in the background don’t react to the presence of the camera, or for that matter, two old Chinese people doing street exercises. A by-product of this unusual filming method is that the sound had to be significantly remixed afterwards.

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