TWO days after I interviewed the young Chinese film-maker Lin Jianjie, Donald Trump escalated the trade trade war between the US and China with the comment that “we should never have let them get so rich.” 

What does it mean for Chinese socialism to have allowed its population to “become rich,” and what does contemporary Chinese culture tell us about this?

In Lin’s film Brief History of a Family, he brings a precise, through-a-microscope attention to this very question. “The government,” he says, “doesn’t mention much about class difference,” but when he had the idea for the film he knew “it has to be about the ‘new middle class’ that is rising. This is a very new contemporary theme about China.”

The core finance for Lin’s film came from China, but it is also co-financed by Denmark and France with elements of post-production taking place in those countries. This allows the project to occupy a space that is able to take advantage of the Chinese economy’s openness to collaboration and investment, and this is reflected in the cultural hybrid and tensions depicted by the drama.

The majority of the film takes place within the family’s apartment and this is a carefully constructed “contemporary version of traditional Chinese culture… but also they have a lot of Western influences because it’s a class that is looking for an identity. We used the set design to bring this co-existence of East and West together,” and it is the  fragility of this aspirational hybrid family unit — or “cell of our society” as Lin puts it — that the film unbalances by introducing an intruder, another boy the same age as their single son, who comes from a “lower class.”

But despite his minute attention to contemporary social realities and psychologically plausible characters, Lin denies that his film is “social realism.” Rather, it is “allegory.”

This is a delicately drawn distinction that suggests the distance he feels from mainstream Chinese film production. “Maybe… they like films with a simple message,” he says. His film is not like that “because that’s not how I see cinema.” Rather, Brief History of a Family refuses to solve its own mystery and remains open to multiple interpretations, presenting itself as an exquisite thought experiment for its audience.

And this is because “although a lot of people talk about it and joke about it, the fact that a middle-class family would even think of adopting the outside kid is very radical from the Chinese point of view.”

So — why do they do it, and what happens?

“See the difference with the Western middle class,” says Lin, “The reason why the family would absorb a member from a lower class is because of class guilt. But in China it’s not about the guilt.” Rather, the impulse is driven by the way the parents see in the intruder the same desire to succeed as their own.

This is not class seen through the lens of property and hereditary privilege, in other words, but as the reward for dedicated self-improvement. In this the intruder far outshines their own disappointing single child.

One basic requirement in this quest for self-improvement is to learn the English language, a near impossible task for these characters, but one which “has been around for a long time” and which is “very competitive, especially if you want the best schools. I think it’s a little bit absurd,” says Lin. When the father applies for a place for the surrogate son you see him queueing up with hundreds of others and the shot has a nightmarish quality. “We shot it in slow motion,” says Lin, and “it becomes interesting, as if they are all hypnotised.”

Within the formality and reticence of the family cell the tension between the two boys escalates and our sympathy switches from curiosity about Shuo, the mysterious intruder, to sympathy with Wei, the displaced son, and his desperate and shocking attempt to reassert his status by spilling his own blood. “His self-harm is definitely inevitable” says Lin, and this is the point of maximum allegorical impact. The real son uses his own blood to displace the intruder, and the intruder vanishes.

So who was the intruder? “Maybe he’s the second child that never exists, the ideal one.” This reflects the impact of the one-child policy. “The experience of being a single child is close to many many people,” says Lin. Or maybe it’s an allegory for Covid, an interpretation the film makes explicit as well: how an unknown virus enters society. “And that poses a question in itself,” says Lin, “because is all virus a bad thing when they invade a healthy organism? A vaccine is also made from the virus, and in a way the film itself is a vaccine.”

The particular achievement of this plot is the character of the intruder. Lin’s background as a biology graduate informs the way he speaks about this character. In certain shots the camera zooms in on him very slowly and “the zoom is like the microscope. Under a microscope, and the closer we get, the more we think we know and the more we attempt to know. But with these characters it’s something very different. The closer we get the more mysterious they become and the more questions we raise about them.”

To have created a character that offers a complete mystery “makes his character extremely rare in the history of cinema. For me, that’s a nice thing to achieve.” The only comparator that I can think of is Terence Stamp’s character in Pasolini’s satire of a bourgeois family, Theorem, and Lin agrees. “That character is probably the closest in spirit because he is almost a religious figure.”

“The film is very clinical, very analytical,” he adds, “but the whole mood is this mystery, this uncertainty.”

Lin describes himself as “an outsider” who “doesn’t try to fit in,” who can’t make “a Chinese Chinese film. I can only make my kind of film.” But clearly his work also represents something very contemporary: the way Chinese culture and investment is seeking partners throughout the world. I ask him if he is an individualist working within the system, or a new mutation of it.

“I feel like it’s the same thing,” he replies.

Brief History of a Family is in cinemas and major streaming platforms.