Peter Chan brings The Road Not Taken to Toronto, guided by eight words
Eight Chinese words shaped almost every choice in Peter Chan Ho-sun's new drama. The Road Not Taken is premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, with Zhou Xun as Jia Jia, a television talk-show host living with early-onset Alzheimer's, according to Variety.
The words are shun shi er wei, shi ke er zhi. They translate roughly as go with the flow, know when to stop. Chan picked them up while researching at an Alzheimer's care facility in Chengdu, where staff offered them as guidance for families: do not correct or argue, follow the patient's sense of reality while recognising when to let go.
The film reached Chan as a finished script. It had been in development since the COVID-19 pandemic, before he made She's Got No Name. He first planned only to produce it. Several film-makers cycled through before the producers and the already-cast ensemble came back to him after that shoot and asked him to direct.
He started again. Chan rewrote the script from scratch and kept a single line from the original draft. He has said his formal schooling in Chinese ended in the sixth grade, so he worked through the rewrite with an assistant because his written Chinese trails his spoken fluency.
He did not want a lecture about illness. He wanted a story about a family coming apart, and how tragedy might help it mend. That meant staying inside the patient's view rather than the family's or carer's view. Early on, Jia Jia forgets the term AI during a live discussion and says artificial talent instead. Later, a leaking tap swells in her mind into a flooded parking garage.
The ending took two attempts. Chan first shot a sequence in which four unknown actors silently replaced the four leads, to show Jia Jia seeing her family as strangers. He cut it. It felt jarring.
He reshot it in simpler form. Jia Jia now recites lines from a decade-old broadcast while speaking to her real family as if they were unfamiliar. TIFF lists the cast as Zhou Xun, Wen Qi, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Wang Xiao, and describes the film as reflecting on what remains when our understanding of the world begins to disappear.
What makes this stand out is the continuity behind it. Zhou Xun reunites with Chan 21 years after his 2005 musical Perhaps Love. Behind the screen, Moebius Entertainment has acquired international rights, the licence to sell the film outside its home market, and will introduce it to buyers and programmers during the Toronto market, according to Variety.
