Mark Reviews Movies: IN THE SAME BREATH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2021

It didn't have to be this way. The novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China, in 2019, now—and likely for the extent of history—commonly referred to as COVID-19, would have resulted in many deaths. We know this (although too many have forgotten or didn't learn it), because of how contagious the virus is and how easily it can spread, even when an infected individual isn't displaying any symptoms.

As of this writing, more than 4 million people around the world have died because of the disease. With new mutations and an unfortunate trend of people being unwilling to receive one of the several vaccines that have been developed to help diminish the symptoms, it is becoming less and less certain how many people will die from the virus when it ends or, for that matter, if this pandemic will ever end.

There almost certainly will never be a narrative or documentary film that gives us the full picture of the COVID-19 period, but even as the pandemic continues, some movies have given us pieces of information, told the story from different perspectives, speculated about how the crisis might continue, or tried to hold those who failed to account. Nanfu Wang's In the Same Breath is an ambitious documentary, in that it attempts to do all of those things, and for the most part, the filmmaker accomplishes almost all of them. In the process, Wang also presents a case study in how two different governments and populations, within separate countries with contrasting central ideologies, can make similarly deadly mistakes for completely different and eerily identical reasons.

For some background, Wang was born and still has family in China. Near the end of 2019, she traveled to Wuhan with her 2-year-old son to visit her mother and celebrate the arrival of 2020. On New Year's Day, two news stories, spread by national and local propaganda agents and media (although that's redundant in the case of the Communist government), caught Wang's attention. The first was the annual New Year's speech from President Xi Jinping, who predicted a year of success for the government, the party, and the country as a whole.

The second came and went without any fanfare or much attention. Eight people were "punished"—whatever that may mean under secretive, authoritarian rule—for spreading rumors online about a new type of pneumonia.

Within days, people in Wuhan started to become ill. Posts and videos on social media started telling about and showing people collapsing dead in the streets (before the government censored them all).

Within a few weeks, the Chinese government finally acknowledged the existence of a new virus. Within days of that announcement, the government said human-to-human transmission was a possibility. A day after that, the entire city of Wuhan was put on lockdown.

We more or less know all of this, not only because the story of the early days—or what actually turned out to be months—of COVID-19 in China has become a bit clearer, but also because it somewhat mirrors what happened in the United States as word of the virus and, then, the virus itself started to spread. Those early denials from various government officials in China are frighteningly reminiscent of statements from U.S. government officials.

That, as well as a lot of connections that Wang directly or indirectly makes as the narrative unfolds, should give us pause. The director, who arranged for her son to be returned to her husband in New Jersey and finally returned herself, rightly argues that the early denials and cover-ups of the disease in China led to its increasing outbreak. She also notes, by the way, that her return to the United States, even though she had been visiting what was more or less ground zero of COVID-19, was met with nothing—no questions about her health, no medical checkup, not even someone taking her temperature. Isn't that kind of intentional and official ignorance or oversight its own kind of denial—its own form of cover-up?

Wang, with the help of a team of camera-people in Wuhan, spends most of this documentary looking at the lockdown from the ground level. It's an impressive piece of real-time investigative journalism, as those local camera operators witness the overwhelmed hospitals, families being forced to decide whether their loved one (or ones) should die at home or die waiting for a hospital bed that likely won't become available, and paramedics walking for 15 minutes to reach a patient, because the roads to certain neighborhoods were blocked.

Meanwhile, in contrast to what we're seeing, the Chinese government, through the news and TV documentaries and public service announcements, try to put a positive spin on the outbreak, focusing on the bravery and determination of healthcare workers, while still—to this day—denying the actual human toll of the disease. If that sounds a bit familiar, the state-run media in China has an excuse that the corporate media and conspiracy theorists in the United States don't have: fear of that government "punishment."

The connections are staggering, startling, and quite depressing. So, too, are the personal stories—ordinary people in China with the same stories of last seeing a loved one being taken away to the hospital, healthcare workers in the United States and China breaking down from the trauma of what they've seen, some of those same nurses in the United States explaining how the hospitals and the CDC were ill-prepared and unhelpful in educating them and the population in general about what was happening.

There were systematic failures—of lies and denial and willful ignorance—in both countries, leading to avoidable deaths. Now, both countries are dealing with the systemic fallout: an official death toll in China that can't trusted (Wang goes to a more reliable source, a funeral home, for some tragic math) and a dishearteningly significant segment of the U.S. population that won't see facts, because the lies feel better and affirm their beliefs.

Is there a way out of this? In the Same Breath doesn't offer much hope, except, perhaps, that we might learn from its thorough dissection of events and, in a devastating final segment, its alternative history of how things could have happened. It doesn't have to be this way again.

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