Photo: Jaclyn Martinez/Amazon MGM Studios
Aishe (Sebiye Behtiyar), the young woman at the center of Preparation for the Next Life, exists on a liminal plane of New York that only sometimes intersects with the visible one. She lives in the bustling Flushing Chinatown of northern Queens, a place that serves as a landing place for thousands of immigrants like her who are looking to establish some kind of toehold in the U.S. She rents a portion of a mazelike partitioned apartment and toils in the backrooms of warehouses and food courts, a participant in the underground economy of the undocumented, where there’s plenty of work to be found as long as you’re willing to be taken advantage of by bosses who are happy to remind you of the precariousness of your situation. While clearing tables in her uniform at a food hall and dozing exhaustedly in her hoodie on the bus, she’s borderline invisible to so many of the people who brush past her every day — but not Skinner (Fred Hechinger), a recently discharged soldier who washes up in the city with everything he owns in a backpack, and who catches her eye over noodles one day, then chases her down the sidewalk to talk.
Preparation for the Next Life, based on a novel by Atticus Lish, is a gorgeous, melancholy love story, though the adaptation frames the relationship it depicts less as a romance than as the intersection of two individuals in their own moments of transition. It’s a much better movie for it, though I’d guess that one of the reasons it’s getting such a quiet release is that it’s not a desperate melodrama about people trying to save each other. The film, which was written by Martyna Majok, marks the scripted debut of director Bing Liu, whose 2018 personal documentary, Minding the Gap, was nominated for an Academy Award. Liu appears well aware of the fraught history of Asian women pinning their hopes on mercurial white men who hold all the cards, in both a fictional tradition stretching back to Madame Butterfly and in his own life: After he and his mother moved from China to Rockford, Illinois, when he was a child, she remarried a local man who was a racist and abusive to both of them. Aishe is far from a delicate flower doomed to be crushed underfoot by tragedy, by nature and in her very physicality. She runs and weight-trains, as she was taught by her late father, in what little she has by way of free time. And she approaches the hardships she has to endure with a clear-eyed pragmatism and square-shouldered endurance that only gives way once, when she’s swept up by ICE agents who search her and pocket her cash before sweeping her off to a detention center.
Behtiyar, in her first onscreen role aside from some student shorts made at Savannah College of Art and Design, is a remarkable discovery — an actor whose intensity beams through in every scene, even the ones in which Aishe is at rest. Her beauty, in the film, is positioned as secondary to her main appeal, which is the warmth that Aishe allows only brief glimpses of at first. It takes a long time for her to let down her guard, and her reluctance is overcome only in part by Skinner’s persistence — the tougher process is the one in which she has to decide whether she’s going to allow herself a bit of sweetness in a life otherwise driven by determination to save and get some security. During their first night out together, the couple ducks into a Spanish nightclub, drinking under a smear of colored lights and then dancing. The scene is almost deliriously intoxicating, not because of the booze, but because of the giddy relief of what Aishe is allowing herself. Skinner is sweet and naïve, a puppy dog who is only a bit younger than she is but far less experienced, though he did sustain the loss of his closest friend while deployed. Still, he’s a traumatized boy at heart, one who insists he’s willing to marry Aishe if it will help her with her immigration issues, but who doesn’t show up when she asks him to meet her at the end of her shift because he’s gotten too drunk biding his time at a bar instead.
Hechinger has been carving out a place for himself as one of the industry’s most reliable young weirdos, but he’s miscast here, too obvious in his instability from the start to make it plausible that someone as cautious as Aishe would even consider pinning her hopes on Skinner. But it doesn’t matter when Preparation for the Next Life is so very much Aishe’s movie. It never even feels the need to wedge in exposition about what it means that she’s Uyghur — a member of the Muslim ethnic minority who have been subjected to a campaign of surveillance, persecution, imprisonment, and forced sterilization by the Chinese government. Liu understands that for Aishe to have to explain herself is to assume you cannot understand her experience in its own right. She is Chinese, and she speaks Mandarin, but she’s an outsider even in this imported enclave because she’s not Han, and the father she remembers in flashbacks died serving in the military of a country that would prefer they not exist. She’s alone, which is a terrible burden but also a source of strength. And, without needing to preach, Preparation for the Next Life delineates the limits of immigrants reaching for solidarity from white Americans who may be experiencing their own hardships, but who are never going to be in danger of being deported.
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