Perhaps in another life, theirs would be a simple love story. But in this one, nothing comes simply, least of all that. For those living at the margins of modern-day New York City, love is not some transcendent, conquering force but instead a constant negotiation; like their survival, it is fragile, hard-won, far from guaranteed.
“Preparation for the Next Life,” a beautifully tough and unflinching narrative feature debut by the documentary filmmaker Bing Liu (who was Oscar-nominated for “Minding the Gap”), is as sensitive to such painful, implacable realities as it is alive to the possibilities that nevertheless emerge, in small moments of tenderness and connection, between its characters.
Aishe (Sebiye Behtiyar) is a young Uyghur woman subsisting in the city’s Chinese community; Skinner (Fred Hechinger) is an American soldier back stateside after three tours in Iraq. She’s undocumented and working toward financial stability and legal status, but she fears what will happen to her should she be again detained, as she was for a time when she was smuggled across the border in the back of a truck. He’s a lost soul who’s suffered from severe stress since returning from war, with challenging symptoms that resist medication, but he’s learned to partially conceal these scars, at least for a time, behind an easygoing grin.
It’s not love at first sight when these two meet, but there’s intrigue in the air between them, exhilaration, and yearning. They watch each other, closer than either one of them is used to being watched, and they soon come across a lingua franca in their shared affinity for discipline and physical strength. They test each other through games of one-upmanship (“How many pushups can you do?” “How many beers can you drink?”) that would appear playful were it not for the nervous, butterflies-in-your-stomach sensation both find themselves overwhelmed by. Even the little things, like who’ll pay for what, feel magnified—by their implicitly understood economic precarity as much as the rush of a romance despite it—until they don’t feel small at all. When an evening out reaches that highest-stakes moment of truth, they tumble together past it and into the back of a taxi cab, heading for a hotel, though Skinner nearly leaves his duffel backpack behind and admits breathlessly after retrieving it, “I almost left my whole life back there.”
But the things they carry are not weights so simply shed, and the invisible histories etched into these young itinerants will come eventually to shadow even the intimate moments they share. As Aishe labors at a Chinese restaurant, struggling to make ends meet with the pittance of a salary she’s allotted by a cynical boss (Eddie Yu) who knows she has no alternative, Skinner seems incapable of holding onto work, of doing much other than frequenting a watering hole where there’s an American flag behind the bar and some of the guys will spot their fellow veteran a beer. Alone in his rented basement room, he sometimes takes out his standard-issue service pistol and just sits there, holding it in his hand. Before long, the relationship is no longer new. Aishe and Skinner start working out together at a local gym; as they pump iron and trade blows, there’s solace to be found in reassuring one another of their own resilience, in agreeing there are some things they still control.
Compassionately adapted by the playwright Martyna Majok from Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel of the same name, “Preparation for the Next Life” drops us headfirst into the kind of clamorous urban expanse where one million people live alone, perpetually at risk of falling through the cracks of an unfeeling world, and Liu patiently observes as his characters make their way through it, his astute and naturalistic eye alighting on subtle facial expressions, movements, and gestures that reveal more of their emotional states than either could readily articulate.
It goes almost without saying that, without lead actors capable of conveying such fraught and legible emotion, “Preparation for the Next Life” would be reduced to observing its characters from the outside in. But there is such specificity, interiority, and depth to be found in Behtiyar’s debut screen performance, in her weighing of Aishe’s deep-rooted pragmatism against her desire for love and support, in the inextricability of what she wants for herself from what she knows practically that she needs to settle the matter of her identity in a country increasingly hostile to immigrants. Hechinger, playing a character whose psychological landscape wears devastation in layers but who lacks the self-access necessary to sort through them, makes Skinner’s forever war palpable without quite letting it overtake his portrayal of a young man struggling, earnestly, to find himself again.
Ebbing and flowing through a poignantly impressionistic first hour in which Ante Cheng’s warm, intimate cinematography and Emile Mosseri’s gorgeously diaphanous score distill the sense of its characters’ relationship ever so gradually deepening, “Preparation for the Next Life” mirrors the harsher, intrusive realities of its second half by slowing down. Observing with a sorrowful stillness what might be undeniable about Aishe’s circumstances, once the glow of possibility she’d felt in the relationship’s early stretches starts to fade away, Liu’s film retains—almost to the end—a strikingly unsentimental clarity. Reckoning with the sacrifices that people make to survive in this country, and with the ugliness of what real love can sometimes resemble, he emerges with an achingly honest meditation on the loneliness of building a life for oneself.
