Director Bing Liu makes a point of seeing all the other people around Aishe (Sebiye Behtiyar) at any given point in “Preparation for the Next Life” as she moves through the world. She may always feel alone as an immigrant, specifically one of Uyghur descent which puts her at a distance from the Chinese community that she’s closest to culturally, but as she walks through the kitchens of restaurants where she works the front of the house or heads to law offices where others seek advice on obtaining permanent citizenship, the brisk camerawork suggests she can’t pay attention to others, but in fact so many others share the exactly same plight, all reduced to the shadows but diligently propping up a functioning society in their adopted home country.
Liu’s moving adaptation of Atticus Lish’s novel, penned by Martyna Majok, is a love story at heart, but it isn’t romantic when Aishe and her eventual lover Skinner (Fred Hechinger), a recently discharged Army vet, barely scrape by, with their bond simultaneously strengthened and weakened by their shared misfortune in a place where it seems no one cares for them. They meet on the streets of Chinatown while she’s on a dinner break from her job and he impresses her as a military man, reminding her of her father ho instilled in her a discipline and dedication to physical exercise, which becomes as much as a love language between the two as any verbal communication. However, from the massive duffel bag he carries around with him containing all his belongings after leaving the fort in Virginia, Aishe has to know she’s taking on a lot with Skinner, who would seem to suffer from PTSD and needs at least five prescriptions to be able to get up in the morning.
When Skinner complains that he doesn’t know what the pills actually do while he fears what will happen if he should run out, it becomes a potent parallel with Aishe’s own frustrations that as hard as she works, it doesn’t appear as if she’s getting anywhere and their individual struggles threaten to doom the couple. While the two are genuinely passionate towards one another, marriage is discussed in only the most practical of terms, brought up for the first time not between the two of them, but Aishe and a legal secretary. (One of the film’s standout sequences is Aishe trying to avoid paying the $100 per hour that a lawyer would require for advice, leaving her to trail around the office with a subordinate trying to get what info she can for free.) When Liu and cinematographer Ante Cheng bring the same level of sensuality of a Wong Kar-wai-Chris Doyle collab to the early part of Aishe and Skinner’s relationship, the colder reality that awaits them hits particularly hard.
After establishing himself with the 2018 documentary “Minding the Gap” where the overall sophistication of the storytelling made it easy to overlook how spry the camerawork was, surely due in no small part to making skate videos when he was young and his work in various camera departments over the years, Liu sees what could be a somber story as one full of invigorating energy instead, emphasizing the hustle required for Aishe to stay afloat, at times pleasurable when she experiences the exhilaration of finding a kindred spirit in Skinner and at others simply self-preservation when any lamentation seems like time wasted. The film has top-notch production values across the board, from production designer Kelly McGehee’s immediately recognizable evocations of a subterranean city to “Minari” composer Emile Mosseri’s exquisitely undulating score that captures the film’s central couple when they are in sync with one another and when they are not. Of course, this is also evident from the strong dynamic that Behtiyar and Hechinger have, with the former’s poise in stark contrast to the latter who registers a look of being lost that is undeniably deep, and like so many other details in the film that can be picked up in an instant, it allows a weighty narrative to really soar.
“Preparation for the Next Life” opens in select theaters on September 4th.