What do two people — once man and wife — do when they meet for the first time in over half a century? Answer: They sit down to eat. Or at least, that's the case in this carefully polished jewel of a film, "Apart Together" ("Saikai no Shokutaku" in Japan), which won the Silver Bear at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival. Here, eating together is an occasion to air emotions, savor conversations and steal looks at the face of a loved one. The mere act of pouring tea is charged with meaning, even eroticism, and the handling of chopsticks may signal a brief, private retreat down memory lane.
As red-carpet fare goes, this one is far from anything remotely glamorous; the centerpiece is Lisa Lu, who has worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, Ang Lee and a dozen others over her stellar, 50-plus-year career. Lu is now 83, and her role in "Apart Together" is that of a woman embroiled in a delicate menage a trois that mostly unfurls over a wooden dinner table in a rickety old house, tucked away in downtown Shanghai.
"Apart Together" is directed by Quan'an Wang, whose last big-ish film was "Tuya's Marriage" (which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2007) and also featured a woman torn between love and obligation as three men vie for her attention. Then, too, the dinner table played a crucial, pivotal function: It was the place where everyone gathered for physical sustenance and the venting of emotional turmoil, before getting up and returning to work.