‘The Calming’: How An 18-Page Screenplay Sent By Jia Zhangke Became Actress Qi Xi’s “Most Different” Work

Following a woman’s multi-city journey after a breakup, The Calming is a tenderly-drawn, delicately-sketched portrait of sorrow and strength. Directed by Song Fang, with Jia Zhangke onboard as executive producer, the Chinese film picked up the CICAE Art Cinema Award for best film in the Berlinale’s Forum section in February this year. It has made stops at San Sebastián, as well as at the New York Film Festival. Coming off projects like Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son and Lou Ye’s Mystery, Actress Qi Xi anchors the emotional tides of the film as the heartbroken Lin Tong, a documentary director in her early thirties.

Traversing Tokyo, Niigata, Hong Kong, Nanjing and Beijing as the seasons change, Lin Tong navigates the uneasy currents and unfamiliar loneliness of her post-breakup life. The film opens with Lin Tong visiting an exhibition of her film in Tokyo, connecting with her Japanese curator friend (played by Shozo Ichiyama, who also co-produced The Calming). Later, she sojourns to Niigata in central Japan, makes a stop in Nanjing over Chinese New Year to see her parents and travels to Hong Kong to link up with an old buddy.

Preparing to Bring The Calming To Life

Actress Qi Xi became part of The Calming when Jia Zhangke approached her with an 18-page screenplay of the film. “The script was very refined and beautiful. I really liked it, communicated that to Jia Zhangke, and the collaboration naturally evolved out of that,” Qi shares over email in Mandarin. With the film’s intimate hyper-focus on Lin Tong, Qi bore the large artistic burden of bringing the character’s inner turmoil to life onscreen. Her performance in the film was also the fruit of a long creative process undertaken with director Song Fang. Together, they worked to create the most authentic portrayal of Lin Tong, excavating the character’s most private yearnings.

While preparing for the production, Song visited Qi at her house many times and spent time chatting, looking through Qi’s photographs and listening to the actress’ stories — seeking perhaps, a way of merging real, lived experiences and The Calming’s fictional world. Qi also spent time rehearsing her lines in the Nanjing dialect that her character speaks. Most of the supporting cast around Qi are non-professional actors — and she credits her onscreen mother (played by Ye Yuzhu) and aunt with helping to sharpen her Nanjing dialect.

Qi Xi on Acting and Staying In The Moment

On set, Song gave Qi free rein in her performance — letting her do many takes, and giving Qi the space and time to allow her best performance reveal itself. “I have a lot of scenes spent in silence and solitude. This is a big challenge for me, because I’m a very active and talkative person,” Qi says. “Yet, over those few months of filming, through growing close to my character Lin Tong, I’ve sort of become quieter and more composed too.”

Finding a way to express the acute, internal turbulence of Lin Tong in the film’s sparse dialogue can be challenging. Yet, The Calming makes a quiet, artistic argument that this is more true-to-life: life’s sorrows, anxieties and emotional turmoil are often contemplated in silence. In her director’s statement, Song said, “Compared with literature, cinema might have its descriptive limits. But cinema has an innate power to seize a moment visually that verbal language cannot match.”

How does an actor express this wordlessness that accompanies so much of life and living? How do you express visually what remains so stubbornly within the mind? “I try to feel and see as Lin Tong would,” Qi says. “If I see dazzlingly bright lights while in a taxi, I will really look at that light; if I witness the gentle fall of snowflakes, I will really look at that snowflake. I live honestly in that present time and atmosphere, and forget that I’m an actress, and even become less aware of the camera’s existence. The serenity and solitude of these moments are very enjoyable.”

When The Calming premiered in the Forum section of the Berlinale in February this year, it was Qi’s second Berlin outing in a row, having attended the festival last year after starring in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son. These premieres are also where Qi watches the films she acts in, for the very first time. “I was very satisfied. [This film] is a very different kind of project for me,” Qi shares about her impressions after viewing The Calming for the first time with the Berlin audience. “I saw the director’s precision in each image, the cinematographer’s nuances in every composition. The Calming is a work of art — and to me, it is a gift.”