A College Student and His Grieving Dorm Manager Share a Forbidden Bond in Tokyo Competition Title ‘The Night That Binds Us’

Chinese director Wang Jiangyong keeps the camera at a distance in his feature debut “The Night That Binds Us,” which world premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, observing the uneasy connection between a college student and an older dormitory manager. “I think you have to show the painful parts truthfully for the moments of light to move people,” Wang tells Variety. The film adapts a short story of the same name by Zhang Chu, a winner of the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top literary awards. It follows Sun Guofeng, whose parents’ arrest on suspicion of fraud leaves him adrift in Shanghai, and An, the dorm manager who is grieving her daughter’s death and the collapse of her family. Wang says the original story’s image of a dorm manager dancing stayed with him and helped convince him to bring the story to the screen. Wang spent a year developing the script, keeping what he calls the source story’s “pain of alienation and fragile beauty of a forbidden connection.” He added characters including Guofeng’s girlfriend, Yezi, and his roommate, Ale, expanding the story into a relationship among the three. “The space is a container for the characters’ emotions,” Wang says. “They begin in separate areas, then gradually become willing to enter each other’s space.” Wang says he wanted the characters’ inner lives to show in their surroundings: the cold dormitory, Shanghai’s damp rainy season, shifts in light and the distance between people in a room. An’s cramped duty room becomes her refuge, while the empty campus during the holidays reflects Guofeng’s uncertainty. Wang relies on fixed long takes and keeps close-ups to a minimum. He wants the camera to feel like “a quiet observer,” leaving audiences to form their own opinions about the relationship. The characters’ shifting positions in the frame and gradual changes in shot size carry much of the emotional movement. Only in the final long take does the camera follow Guofeng. Hu Ling, who plays An and whose credits include Lou Ye’s “Summer Palace,” says she was in tears the first time she read the script. Liu Xingsheng, an older schoolmate from film school, recommended her to Wang, and she sent the director a video of herself reading the script through tears. “I started acting at 15 and then took a 10-year break. I’ve been through a lot myself. This script convinced me completely and made me want to bring An to life,” Hu tells Variety. “For An, her child matters even more than a man. I wanted to keep her grief understated, like someone whose heart has gone numb,” she says of her discussions with Wang about how much emotion An should show. Hu and Wang also agreed that An and Guofeng’s bond should not be played as a romance. She says she and actor Tan Zuhong, who plays Guofeng, kept their distance off camera as well, remaining courteous colleagues on set. “More than my character, I think Guofeng’s alienation will resonate with people today,” Hu says. “He comes from elsewhere to make a life in a big city, and that feeling of being out of place runs through the film.” Producer Zheng Ruoxing says Japanese culture tends to make personal distance more explicit, “so the film may be especially easy to understand here.” Zheng says the Hong Kong-France co-production came together early in development, when the filmmakers met partners at a project market. After reading the script, those partners connected with the characters’ circumstances and joined the project. The film took nearly a decade to complete. The 2023 shoot lasted 28 days, but editing took three years and went through dozens of versions. Wang says he and producer Zhang Ming, director of 1996’s “Rainclouds Over Wushan,” repeatedly removed explanatory shots, trying to find a rhythm that left more room for viewers to read the characters. Zheng says she and Hu watched Wang’s final cut for the first time together at the film’s world premiere in Tokyo. Wang’s experience as Zhang’s assistant director taught him to trust what happened on set. He did not plan every camera position in advance, instead rehearsing with the actors and letting the staging develop from their interactions with one another and the space. His editing experience, he says, helped him know which shots each scene needed and avoid filming unnecessary material. After completing his first feature, Wang says he has become more convinced that filmmaking often depends on what a director chooses to leave out. His next script is still in development. He plans to keep writing about ordinary people and complicated relationships, while exploring new approaches to film language.