Filmed over four years MIMANG is the story of three chance meetings. First a man gets off a bus at the wrong stop and decides to walk to his destination. Along the way he meets a woman from his past. Jumping ahead the woman and the man meet again several years later and walk the same street. In the final section they meet at a funeral and ponder life.
How you react to the film will be determined by how you react to the nature of the film. There is no narrative, there are just three encounters. It's three conversations had while walking through the same parts of the city. As the characters have changed so has the world around them.
I suspect that some people are going to try and compare the film to Celine Song's film PAST LIVES, in that it's the remeeting of two people over time, however MIMANG is something different, having been started five years ago. MIMANG is also not really interested in the arc of the characters but of the ideas discussed. We are only given the words of each of three conversations so that as a result be can only get to know the characters up to a certain point. In Song's film we are given a great deal more information.
While I enjoyed the film I was kept distant by the formality of the discussion. You can feel the construction and the hands of the director moving things along. Actually what this feels like is a theater piece that isn't really opened up. I would so absolutely buy this on stage, but on film, in real locations feels less real and more artificial then it would on stage.
That said the discussions are heady and worth a listen.
Recommended.
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