LAST LAUGH

After fainting one day, the elderly peasant Lin Guoshi is immediately declared disabled and placed on the waiting list of a nursing home. Until a vacant room comes up, she is left to wander from one of her children’s house to the next, experiencing the new values and needs of a fast changing China.

Reminiscent of Ozu’s Tokyo Story for the candid intimacy of the staging, Last Laugh is young director Zhang Tao’s strikingly controlled feature debut. With the testing actuality of parent-children relationships as a solid narrative keystone, this is a valiant piece of humanist filmmaking.