A Chinese Film Director's Quiet Case for Solitude
The film opens with a song. As a recording by Taiwanese singer Tsai Chin plays, the camera drifts from right to left across the Fuchun River, its surface wrapped in fog, before settling on a residential building and moving inside one family’s apartment. That slow, deliberate opening sets the tone for ‘First Taste of Loneliness,’ the new film from director Gu You, who spoke about it in an interview with a Chinese culture outlet.
The title is a provocation. In everyday Chinese conversation, loneliness is usually treated as a problem to be solved, something to be fixed with more friends, more plans, more noise. Gu’s argument, as he lays it out in the interview, runs the other way: loneliness is not necessarily a烦恼, the word for trouble or worry. It can also be an entrance, a place where a person begins to see clearly. The distinction matters because it reframes a feeling that many people spend their lives avoiding.
The conversation moves quickly to the idea of growth. Gu describes it as the moment a person accepts that the world contains both good and bad, whether or not that person likes it. The line appears twice in the published interview, as if to underline it. It is a plain thought, but it sits at the center of the film’s emotional logic: the characters are not asked to become happier, only to become more honest about what they are living through.
Gu’s choice of setting carries its own weight. The Fuchun River, in Zhejiang province, has long been associated with classical Chinese landscape painting, especially the work of Huang Gongwang, whose scroll of the same river is one of the country’s most celebrated artworks. By opening on that water in fog, the film borrows some of that stillness. The camera does not rush. It lets the mist do the work.
The interview also touches on the texture of ordinary life. The film’s characters live in apartment blocks, not palaces; they eat, they worry, they sit with their thoughts. That scale is deliberate. A story about loneliness does not need a dramatic rupture, and Gu seems less interested in grand events than in the small adjustments people make when no one is watching.
For an international audience, the appeal is not exoticism. It is recognition. China’s cities are loud, fast and crowded, and the pressure to be socially connected is real. A film that treats solitude as something other than failure speaks to a wider unease, one that shows up in self-help essays, in late-night phone habits and in the quiet decisions people make about who to let into their lives.
Gu’s own manner in the interview is unhurried. He does not offer slogans. He talks about acceptance, about the world being what it is, and about the value of staying with a feeling long enough to understand it. Whether the film succeeds will depend on whether audiences are willing to sit with that slowness too.
The director’s name may be unfamiliar outside China, and the film has not yet been widely shown abroad. But the questions it raises are portable. What does it mean to be alone without being lost? And what would change if a culture stopped treating solitude as a symptom and started treating it as a skill?