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. 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. 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.
Gu’s wife’s father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer not long after the couple met, and he died a year after they married. The film takes its title from a Teresa Teng song that plays toward the end. 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. 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.
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