MUBI

Still Life, is, in its discreet way, another dystopian fable, dealing with the end of civilisation. The film is set in the last days of a 2000 year old city, Fengjie, over an unclear period of a time. The town will be submerged as a result of the Three Gorge’s dam being built on the Yangtze river, and the film follows the journeys of two unconnected characters who travel there looking for their missing spouses.

The currents of history, both personal and political, flow through the film, suggesting the rootlessness caused by the political act of destroying the city is mirrored in the lives of the citizens in the new China. The labourer Han Sanming comes to the town by river to seek a wife who left him sixteen years ago. His story is counterpointed by that of Mrs Guo, the wife of a party official, who has not seen him for two years. Her story is sandwiched within Han Sanming’s, and any connections are implicit, rather than direct.

Han Sanming’s is played with a kind of virile docility by the actor who shares his name. A labourer who knows little of the city but arrives and becomes a part of its destruction, working in the demolition teams. These are frequently captured on film like the still lives of the title, the labourers framed from a distance, sometimes sillhouetted. The act of labour eclipses the artifacts of labour – buildings and monuments collapse at the whim of history (Mrs Guo’s contact for her husband is an archeologist, excavating ruins within soon-to-be-ruins) but human toil continues until the bitter end.

Still Life is a stately film, infused with the torpor of Sichuan Province. Nothing happens in a hurry. A cigarette lingers, a husband waits sixteen years before he decides to find his lost wife. When he does she asks him to sit down and offers him a plate of noodles. Civilisations come and go, but history is subject to the sluggish tide of human development and perception. Some of the most eye catching scenes in the film are a-historical: the monument blasting into space; and the filmmaker’s whimsical depiction of a UFO, the only point of connection between the twin protagonists, suggesting that no matter what influence the historical powers of China seek to exert on history, even geography, there will always be forces beyond their control.

While this movie had a ponderous feel, it actually moves at a brisk pace shepherded along by all of the walking that its main characters do. There are some lovely shots of the region and of small details but at the same time, for me, the movie conveyed a sense of claustrophobia. The clouds never lifted and there never seems to be enough elbow room in China. All those men, packed into scenes, shirtless and shoulder to shoulder, The need for a bit of space must be a Western thing because I don’t think that the US working poor would stand for that much closeness. I’ll guess that the director, Jia Zhangke was influenced by Jim Jarmusch, although Wikipedia connects him to Michelangelo Antonioni. While an argument can be made that the movie is about the destruction of a region in China it seems to also be about loss of control and the destruction of the individual. I don’t know if this would have made my top 10 of 2008, as it did many others, but there is indeed some fine movie making here.

Independent Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke’s fifth film – and his second that’s passed the Chinese censors – contrasts a poetic, lyrical technique with the harsh realities of everyday life in China. Committed to showing “Chinese reality without distortion,” Jia casts a despondent look at the corruption of everyday life through two parallel stories centered around the Three Gorges Dam.

The coal miner Han Sanming grew up in Fengjie, a 2000 year old town destined for submersion. He returns to his hometown to look for his wife and daughter, who left him 16 years ago, only to find that his street he grew up on is already lost beneath the rising waters. At the same time, Shen Hong searches for her husband, who left for Fengjie two years prior for lucrative contractor work, and has only spoken to her briefly over the phone since.

The beauty of Still Life stems from its ability to engage us on several levels simultaneously. For starters, it’s a rigorously spare examination of the less-than-glitzy realities of Chinese life. We witness a culture filled with corruption, a startling acceptance of the amoral vicissitudes requisite for survival. Jia’s actors communicate this with an emotional detachment worthy of Bresson, while Yu Lik-wai’s camera work pans across his canvases with a lush mix of Tarkovian patience and Coutardian saturation (all unbelievably shot with digital video).

Instead of functionally narrative intertitles, Jia’s punctuates scenes with banal and seemingly random commodities pulled from their surroundings. Combined with the camera’s lack of commitment to its subjects and two very unexpected mystical non-sequitur, we’re left to contemplate Jia’s overall message. Is this a poetic attempt to communicate the vagaries and insignificance of his character’s lives in the midst of an overpopulated nation, a vanishing culture, and an uncaring and omnipresent bureaucracy? Or is this simply a way for Jia to transmit a less-than-accepted message to the world in a way that censors might not catch? Or perhaps it’s both – or neither.

Either way, from Still Life’s opening shot, I was transfixed by the film’s stark beauty and patient pacing. It won the Golden Lion upon its premiere at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, and its theatrical release in the US in 2008 has seen it top several critics’ “best-of-08” lists. Although its art-film flavor is likely unpalatable for mass consumption, I have no doubt that it will influence serious film-makers for years to come.

Jia Zhang Ke is a very interesting director of a kind I haven’t seen since Antonioni. The story and characters are molded to a certain mood the filmmaker creates. Where the sounds and vistas of the location are as important as the people who inhabit them. The story of two people searching for their spouses is a good one and it’s told in a placid way I felt rewarded to have taken in. The use of naturally lit HD in this movie is something to see. It’s so crisp and absorbing. It gives the movie a transcendental quality.

What the aliens in the movie were meant to signify is beyond me. I’ll have to see it again to figure this out.

Very beautiful, slow camerawork, almost as if the film tries to keep in mind all the random still lifes it shows – things on cupboards, a chest expander hanging from a wall, a bag of tea in a locker – things that soon will cease to exist, when the dam is completed. And then, all of a sudden, poetic-realism stuff like a building taking off like a rocket ship, a man on wire between two houses, a building at the horizon being blown off while the couple standing in the foreground. Really beautiful landscape as a bonus.
Go see it!