Directing: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

In the Same Breath begins with images of the celebrations when Wuhan rang in the year 2020, and with the benefit of hindsight, the images—thongs of unmasked people packed into public streets of a major city center—are indeed eerie. Conversely, In the Same Breath ends with images of the celebrations when Wuhan rang in the year 2021, and it’s a bizarre sight, from an American perspective, to see nearly exactly the same throngs. The only difference is that everyone there is wearing a mask. Here in the States, though, most places, while nowhere near as strictly locked down as they once were, are not yet at a point where allowing large public gatherings is advisable, masked or not.

Director Nanfu Wang, who previously directed One Child Nation in 2019 about China’s one-child policy, is in a unique position to tell the story of how both China and the U.S. compared in their initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is, indeed, the second documentary feature I have watched and reviewed about this pandemic and failed responses to it, the first being Totally Under Control from last fall, but that film focused entirely on U.S. failings. Wang is from China, but married to an American man, and went to visit her parents in China right around the dawn of the pandemic, in early 2020. Her husband and small child flew back home to the U.S. before she did, so she could stay behind and look after her mother.

I always wonder how much footage a filmmaker had when they put together a documentary on such a broad subject. Wang clearly recorded a massive amount. In the Same Breath is so excellently edited, it brings to mind the fact that, with enough footage, you can skillfully edit anything to tell the story you want. Here, she effectively compares the early responses to the coronavirus between China and the United States, and we can disparage communism or socialism all we want, but there are pretty stunning similarities. It should also be noted that, in many cases, the footage simply speaks for itself. Dr. Anthony Fauci, long regarded as one of the most trusted medical authorities in the U.S.—and, to be clear, I trust him even now—is shown in early interviews insisting that Americans have little to worry about. He gets specific in a way that is shocking in hindsight, saying there is no need for us to walk around wearing face masks.

American nurses are later interviewed clarifying that CDC recommendations from the start were “not based on science, but based on supply.” I never quite heard it put that way before. The problem with that, as this film makes abundantly clear, is that it sets a precedent for the people to mistrust anything the government tells them later, especially after changing their tune. What the U.S. government should have done instead, says one nurse, is make it clear from the start that the guidelines were based on supply.

One of the more impressive aspects of In the Same Breath is Wang’s complete lack of judgment as a filmmaker—and her notably open empathy. She understands that the Americans protesting lockdown measures are way off base and likely costing lives, but she recognizes in them the very same sorts of assumptions she made while in the U.S. at the start of the pandemic. She can hardly believe it herself, how much she took for granted that the U.S. was “more advanced” and thus not as dangerous a place in a pandemic as China had been, in spite of literally having just been in China and seeing all the same warning signs again in the States.

The focus thus far in this review notwithstanding, In the Same Breath spends more time on the outbreaks in China than on those in the U.S. I’d say maybe two thirds of the film is focused on China, and about a third on the U.S. China is where the virus originated, after all. And she makes fascinating comparisons between public sentiment toward their government in the two countries. She makes multiple references to the Orwellian-sounding “Propaganda Department” in China, and their methods clearly work: multiple key interview subjects, after telling stories about loss of closed loved ones due to what clearly amounts to government negligence, express earnest gratitude toward the Communist Party. This, after we are told the “official” death toll in Wuhan is around 3,000 but funeral home workers estimate it to be in the tens of thousands. And Chinese local news anchors say things like “U.S. politicians’ handling of the coronavirus is a testament to the failure of democracy.”

Well, if In the Same Breath illustrates anything at all, it’s that neither Americans nor the Chinese have cause to point fingers. Perhaps it’s a darkly universal thing, the mere hubris of humanity. Both governments dismissed any ringing of alarm, until infection rates and deaths could no longer be ignored. Wang spotlights the trauma of health care workers in both countries, the footage of nurses in China predictably limited, but she does get some. Still, this is where she interviews a few select nurses in the greater New York City area (plus one funeral home worker), and splices together the moments when each of them inevitably breaks down crying. This is not sensationalism or exploitation; it’s an illustration of the cost of these disastrous circumstances. And, while the early expression of concern in Chinese hospitals resulted in legal recourse for “spreading rumors,” in the U.S. health care workers early on were threatened with termination if they insisted on wearing face masks.

An early scene, when Wang had several camera operators taking endless footage secretly inside Wuhan hospitals, features a young man being forced to decide between taking his grandmother back home, or leaving her at a hospital that has no available beds. We’ve heard these stories many times over in the U.S. as well, a reflection of all the desperate pleas for us to “help flatten the curve.” This begs a question Wang does not even try to answer: what kind of public panic might we have been facing if the entire truth were rolled out all at once, about both the severity of the virus and the severity of lockdown measures truly needed to contain it?

There is a curious effect when watching documentaries like this, which dramatize a global event that played out over the course of an entire year and packs it into a 100-minute run time. It creates a sense of widespread chaos that was not necessarily prevalent outside of hospitals and nursing homes, and it says nothing of the endless tedium also experienced by millions during extended stay-home orders. It could be argued that we would have suffered more actual chaos had too much truth been given too quickly. Then again, and this perhaps gets back to Wang’s evident point, the authorities could have issued things like mask-wearing guidelines much earlier and just said they were out of an abundance of caution, with no imminent danger—which would have been much closer to the truth if we’d all been wearing masks and social distancing from the start. Wang also doesn’t bother to note how little was known about COVID-19 and its specific dangers until enough time had passed for proper study.

This kind of back and forth could go on forever, really. The key takeaway from In the Same Breath is that China and the United States made very similar missteps in the early days of the pandemic, and having wildly different government structures seemed to make little difference in that matter.

*A nation mourns regardless of the nation.*

Overall: B+