Critics reviews

In retrospect, the Jia film to be singled out as the Chinese director's masterpiece, as it now represents a meeting point in his filmography. The early documentary-inspired approach that earned him the accolades of critics appears in this film married with the operatic and bombastic quality of his later films.

It stands somewhat at the intersection of the director's earlier, more distinctly fictional, narrative films, and with his more recent, documentary style releases. While there is a plot and characters, this picture also captures a specific moment in time and records a pronounced and profound shift in the Chinese landscape and the culture around the Three Gorges town Fengjie. In so doing, Jia crafts what remains his greatest work, and indeed, it is one of the best films of the last 25 years.

To focus too much of one's attention on the political arm of Still Life is to run the risk of missing Jia's more intimate, overarching notion that even those closest to us – children, spouses, siblings – can pass through our lives like strangers... Jia draws a fine line between the corporeal and ethereal in Still Life, a fitting means of highlighting the inherent unbelievability of one's way of life disappearing underwater.

It's more tough, complex, dense, allusive, and mysterious, than any feature Jia has made to date... There are trade-offs, obviously, in a filmmaker's choice of medium today. What Still Life gains is precisely the shock of truth. Its "video-ness" suggests an immediate, direct transcription of reality that challenges the viewer in what can only be described as an ontological way. Look at what reality is; look deeply into the way things actually exist, the film seems to be demanding.

It's both a mutedly angry political exposé and a metaphysical mystery concerning the spread of a malady, of political origins, that could be called soullessness. Jia presents the planned destruction of cities, the suppression of history, and the breaking of human bonds as inextricably bound together.

The enormity of the [Three Gorges Dam] project and its impact on Chinese geography has created all by itself a post-apocalyptic landscape only hinted at in sci-fi movies... It's "Waterworld: The Prequel," or one of Antonioni's garbage dumps times a zillion -- that is, an absurd crystallization of how developmental progress ruins lives across the globe.

I've said before in these pages that Jia (whose previous films include The World, Unknown Pleasures and Platform) is the greatest Chinese filmmaker of his generation. In Still Life, his great subject — that of a nation making "progress" faster than its own people can keep up with it — reaches its fullest and most painfully beautiful expression yet. Simply one of the best films of last year, this year, or any year likely to come.

A document of China's break-neck growth that tells us more about the present than most films that would call themselves documentaries... The film has more in common with a photograph than the painting its title suggests, capturing an instant in a rapidly changing world. It stresses the passage of time to express a feeling for life. A focus on time brings a focus to life.

One important fact about Jia that I don't believe has been discussed too much: he's really quite the entertainer. Unlike some of today's leading art-film lights, he doesn't ask the audience to dip into its reserves of patience or endurance: he wants everyone to have a good time... He peppers the film with manifestations of the uncanny.

A superficially monotonal cityscape, captured in subtle gradations of color by Jia and cinematographer Yu Lik-wai on HD video, the director's Fengjie proves to be as rich an environment as the more vibrant settings of his previous films, if one ultimately less reflective of any redemptive possibilities.

This 2006 drama may seem to be worlds apart from the surreal theme-park setting of Jia's previous film, The World, but there are similarities of theme, style, scale, and tone: social and romantic alienation in a monumental setting, a daring poetic mix of realism and lyrical fantasy, and an uncanny sense of where our planet is drifting.

As a story about people searching (for...) it is a fairly affecting film. But it is only when the human interest is understood within its wider contexts specifically--not as the dramatic heart of a social message but as micro-developments within a macro-narrative--that I think Still Life emerges as one of the very richest and most important "festival films" of recent years that I've had the fortune of seeing.