Nanfu Wang follow-up to her 'One Child Nation' is an HBO documentary titled ”In the Same Breath”, it deals with the Chinese Communist Party coverup of COVID-19 during the early stages of the outbreak. The first half of Wang's film, its stronger section, recaps the chaos that gripped Wuhan at the start of the outbreak in early 2020. The second half focuses more on the arrival of the virus in the U.S., and reaction from government, media, and the CDC to make us believe the virus was nothing more than a bad flu. Wang even inserts a clip of Anthony Fauci, early on during the pandemic’s infancy, stating that it was nothing more than a flu and that masks were not necessary. That hasn’t aged well and someone will have to eventually ask the NIAID director about it.
Wang’s doc was made from an immeasurably well-informed point of view, Wang is a dual citizen of both the U.S. and China. Through her vast wealth of connections in the mainland, she paints a none-too-pleasant portrait of the CCP and its leader President Xi Jiping. She uses archival sound-bytes and clips from Chinese state media, hires local camera people to shoot secret footage in Wuhan hospitals and even manages to contact doctors from private clinics, including one near the seafood market identified as the possible point of origin for the virus. The cumulative assault of information results in a damning indictment of an authoritarian coverup, starting with the January 2nd announcement by the CCP, via a news bulletin, about Wuhan police punishing eight people for spreading online rumors of an unknown pneumonia.
The Chinese government's withholding of information, downplaying the threat and saying there was no risk of human-to-human transmission, despite hospital workers stating the contrary, was enough of a domino effect to thrust the entire world into virus-infected chaos. One would have liked to have seen this particular topic more wittingly dissected by Wang, but, instead, in the film’s flawed second half she turns her eye to U.S. botching of the virus, casting an unfair parallel between China’s evil coverup and American institutions themselves embarking on their own downplaying of COVID-19.
Wang’s film is messy, but passionate, not really able to find coherence amidst the madness of its subject matter. Due to the CCP’s refusal for total transparency, do you blame it for that? We still don’t know the full story and this means a more essential doc will eventually come to be released in the next few years as more info continues to come to light.
The official death toll in China currently sits at 4,636, a total farce of a stat as related to the anecdotal evidence gathered by Wang at funeral homes and hospitals that leads the viewer to the obvious conclusion that the final count was probably 10-20x more than that. Ofnote; many of the talking heads Wang interviews in this insightfully brave doc either, soon after, died or completely disappeared, probably victims of a totalitarian regime that watches your every move and punishes wrongthink.
SCORE: B/B+
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.