Us and Them
2018 · René Liu
Ten years ago, on a train home during the busy Spring Festival travel period, fate brings Xiaoxiao and Jianqing together. Like many young couples, they meet, fall in love, and strive to make it work, but eventually, the harsh realities of life make them drift apart. Ten years later, they run into each other again. Will they make the most of this second chance and rekindle what they once lost?
dir. René Liu · 2018
René Liu — the Taiwanese singer and actress whose ballads soundtracked a generation of Chinese heartbreak — made her directing debut with a romance pitched precisely at that generation: the 'Beijing drifters,' young provincials chasing futures in the capital's rented rooms and internet cafés. Xiaoxiao and Jianqing meet on a packed train during the Spring Festival migration, the world's largest annual movement of people, and the film keeps returning to those journeys home as the measure of everything gained and lost between them. Liu splits the timeline elegantly: the remembered past unfolds in warm color, the present-day reunion in black and white — an inversion of nostalgia's usual palette that lands like a quiet verdict. Zhou Dongyu, one of the finest faces in contemporary Chinese cinema, plays Xiaoxiao with a bruised buoyancy opposite Jing Boran's stubborn dreamer. Produced by Zhang Yibai, the film became a box-office phenomenon in China — among the highest-grossing films ever directed by a woman at the time — before Netflix carried it worldwide. Its emotional engine is a very old one, handled without shame: the person you loved when you had nothing.
Lines of influence
- Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) — Establishes the mainland-migrant-lovers template Us and Them runs on — two economic drifters who fall together in hardship, part, and are structurally reunited years later, the whole romance measured against the passage of time and money.
- Spring Subway (2002) — Producer Zhang Yibai's own glossy urban-romance grammar — stylized Beijing longing, voiceover confession, couples framed against transit — is the house melodrama style he transplants into his protégée's debut.
- Beijing Bicycle (2001) — Sixth-Generation beipiao realism: the cramped rentals, courier hustle, and social precarity of migrant youth scraping by in Beijing that grounds the 'love in poverty' texture of Lin Jian and Xiaoxiao's early years.
- Last Train Home (2009) — Renders the chunyun Spring Festival migration as human drama, supplying the crowded-train-home-for-New-Year frame that Us and Them uses as its recurring narrative anchor and site of both meeting and parting.
- The Wizard of Oz (1939) — Canonical palette split coding one world in monochrome and the other in color; Us and Them inverts it — the shared past glows in color while the present-day reunion drains to black-and-white.
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946) — Reverses the expected palette (Technicolor for the living world, monochrome for the beyond); Us and Them borrows that counter-intuitive assignment to make the vibrant past feel more alive than the drained present.
- Wings of Desire (1987) — Uses black-and-white for a detached, unlived state and bursts into color at the moment of embodied feeling — the exact emotional logic by which Us and Them reserves color for the time the couple were truly together.
- Under the Hawthorn Tree (2010) — Launched Zhou Dongyu as the fragile, chaste first-love ingénue; Us and Them trades on and matures that established screen persona of yearning restraint.
- You Are the Apple of My Eye (2011) — Template for the pan-Chinese youth-nostalgia romance told from an older narrator looking back at a first love that got away, framed by a present-day reunion — the genre scaffolding Liu inherits.
- Blue Valentine (2010) — Intercuts the warm ascent of a courtship against the cold present-day of its collapse, distinguishing the two eras by grade and texture — the split-timeline, palette-differentiated structure at the heart of Us and Them.
- (500) Days of Summer (2009) — Shuffles a romance's highs and lows out of chronological order around a breakup so the audience reads the ending back into the beginning — the same non-linear, retrospective ache Liu organizes her editing around.
- So Young (2013) — The direct precedent for Liu's move — a Chinese actress's directorial debut in campus-nostalgia romance that became a box-office phenomenon, proving the star-turned-director youth-melodrama play.
- Soul Mate (2016) — Zhou Dongyu again, in a dual-timeline melodrama built on letters, returns, and a reunion that reframes everything before it — the same reunion-as-decoder-ring structure and lead performer.
- La La Land (2016) — Its counterfactual 'what if we'd stayed together' imagined-alternate-life coda is precisely the device Us and Them stages in its black-and-white sequence — a montage of the future the lovers didn't get.
- Better Days (2019) — Extends the Zhou Dongyu intimate two-hander into a grittier register, carrying forward the realist close-quarters romance/melodrama of precarious young people that Us and Them typified.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — Reconstructs a dissolved relationship through fragmented, subjective memory in which the palette and vividness of scenes track emotional presence — the same memory-as-editing principle behind the inverted nostalgia grade.