After nearly 60 years, a former Nationalist soldier returns to Shanghai and the woman he made pregnant but was forced to abandon. She was once the love of his life, but now she has an extended family and a common-law husband. Wang Quan’an’s film is a subtle, beautifully written work that contrasts traditional ways with the complex life today of contemporary Shanghai. A prize-winner at Berlin, it contains echoes of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu in the way things go unsaid but are still understood between the generations, and in the primacy of the dinner table as the meeting ground for conflict and negotiation.