PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE Review: Bing Liu's Narrative Debut Struggles to Balance Emotion and Social Critique

Bing Liu's debut documentary feature Minding the Gap was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars for its compelling portrayal of three young men, including Liu himself, struggling with racism, familial trauma, and economic precarity.

What made the film special was the almost accidental way it became a devastating document of masculinity in the 21st century Rust Belt. Minding the Gap starts as a skateboarding movie about three friends and allows the audience to connect to these men before organically, if not so slowly, morphing into something more social-minded and emotionally powerful

With Preparation for the Next Life, Liu's debut narrative feature, he attempts to pull off the same trick; or at least the script, adapted by Martyna Majok from the novel of the same name by Atticus Lish, does. The first half of the film establishes the character of Uyghur immigrant Aishe (newcomer Sebiye Behtiyar) and develops her romance with American Iraq war veteran Skinner (Fred Hechinger). Then there's a stark, rather clumsy switch into an almost cliche social problem drama.

We don't see Aishe come to the US. Instead, we start the movie with her already here, living with a group of Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese women whose prejudices have traveled with them from their homeland. She works hard in a restaurant, regularly going beyond what is expected of her, and in voiceover, speaks to the ghost of her father who instilled a strong sense of discipline and determination in her as a girl; in that voiceover, she says she is preparing for her next life.

She attempts to begin that next life with a move to New York, where she meets Skinner, a charmingly awkward, kind man who seems to immediately fall for her upon seeing her. He's not in a particularly strong position to woo or help her though, when we meet him he's sleeping in public and being told he can't be doing that by NYPD officers.

Their romance is palpable largely because of how little dialogue they share. There's some flirting during which it's clear English is her third (possibly fourth) language, while showing that she's perfectly capable of teasing him, even if she's missing a few articles here and there. But the real draw between them is communicated through their eyes and bodies.

When he stares at her we see him alight with desire and unbridled excitement. When she stares at him, we see her study him, charmed and not quite sure what she wants to do next. Yet on one of their first nights out together, she's the one who moves them to a dance floor where their bodies speak what their words cannot. Soon they're running around New York giddily tackling each other in the aisles of stores.

Liu and cinematographer Ante Cheng use a lot of handheld in this section of the movie, allowing us to be inside the developing relationship with sometimes odd angles that allow us to see the way they look at each other and energetically conveying the excitement of the young lovers by chasing them as they chase each other. The images frequently turn everything in the background into a beautiful impressionistic blur while allowing our leads to pop in the foreground, as if they were the only people in the world to one another.

The camera's energy calms with theirs as they become a more committed couple with slightly more stable lives. He rents a room and the two spend time there canoodling and looking at old Facebook photos of his time in Iraq. Then the switch happens.

It's not horrendously handled, there's just a moment that serves as a clear dividing line. On one side of which Preparation for the Next Life is an affecting and sweet romance between a character society has left behind and one it never cared for to begin with. And on the other side of which, we get several scenes that often undercut whatever thought-provoking or eye-opening they're attempting with their roteness.

The problem of this frustrating familiarity falls more firmly on Skinner's side of the story. Aishe's scenes of being exploited as an undocumented laborer are nothing new, but a scene of her discussing the possibility of marriage without having any identifying records from China is more specific (if not unique to Uyghur immigrants) and engaging.

The film's aesthetic changes but never falters. The dark green walls of Skinner's place contrast strikingly with lamplight and the sunlight that blasts through his small basement apartment windows. There's a real willingness to allow images to be dark that necessarily forces viewers to look more closely. That darkness of the private space contrasts with more evenly and well lit public and exterior spaces the characters inhabit, whether it's out on the street, in a mall's food court, or at the gym.

Behtiyar and Hechinger are also fantastic throughout. Even when he needs to throw a drunken temper-tantrum the likes of which we've seen too many times before, he communicates Skinner's desperation to connect through the way he longingly looks at the people around him. Behtiyar's eyes are just as expressive but it's her ability to smoothly shift between English, Uyghur, and Mandarin and reveal emotion through her voice in each that's most remarkable.

Preparation for the Next Life is a promising narrative debut from Liu in its form and the performances he elicits show a talent for working with actors, but the content leaves something to be desired. The organic shift from a movie about characters and their relationships to a movie about systemic failings is possible in a scripted film, but Preparation for the Next Life fails to pull it off. What we're left with is a film that's firmly divided into a half that works and a half that doesn't.

The film opens today in select movie theaters.