Critics reviews

Bi Gan’s non-linear moving images (I wouldn’t call it a film just now) are a fascinating example of Daniel Frampton’s filmmind. His images are free floating, The film moves to wherever it wants to move. Past, present, future – it all seems to be one.

Beautiful, mysterious, lyrical, somehow relaxing in spite of its sadness and implications of dread.

One looping shot, reflecting a Buddhist view of the universe as an endless cycle of life, death, and reincarnation, adds to the film's hallucinatory aura, as does a trippy, ethereal score by Lim Giong (a frequent collaborator of Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien). Bi Gan directed this boldly original debut feature.

This impressive debut feature by Bi Gan, who was all of 26 when he made it, contains the undisputed Shot of the Month, a 40-minute take that comprises most of the film's latter half. The marathon sequence, a sort of lucid bobbing and weaving that follows multiple characters through the back alleys and across the waterways of the subtropical town of Dangmai, somehow also feels like a shortcut across time.

[The 40-minute tracking shot] is onto something; that something so impressive should feel regrettable, like a great risk that doesn't quite pay off or that doesn't do the film's worthy ideas justice, is proof of what Bi has accomplished, by and large. Kaili Blues is good enough that this lapse almost doesn't register, so dreamy that you wonder whether it even happened, just as you wonder whether Kaili is a place that actually exists. It does, of course. It exists in the image.

Mixing the mundane and the mystical (unexplained recurring motifs, reports of "wild men" living in the forest, etc.) against a backdrop of mountainsides and crumbled concrete, Kaili Blues plays freely with reality and time, bringing to mind the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Bi, part of China's Miao ethnic minority, seems to have taken Apichatpong as an example; the Thai filmmaker's influence is all over Kaili Blues, and its imagery is as personal and culturally specific as Apichatpong's.

The spectacular cinematography of Tianxing Wang shifts gears midway through, as Bi moves from simple, stable takes to a 40-minute-long tracking shot depicting Chen's journey up a mountain to find Wei Wei. "Kaili Blues" has the kitchen-sink feel of a new director eager to try every art-film technique in the book, but the film's beauty and inventiveness are riveting.

If the mode is contemplative and the mood entropic, the visual information is rich and lively. As a filmmaker, Bi operates on all cylinders—for its first half hour or so, Kaili Blues is a flurry of sudden close-ups, slow dissolves, and subtly off-kilter camera placement. (The movie is also an impressive debut by the director of photography, Tianxing Wang.)

...A tour guide named Yangyang takes a short boat ride from one side of a river to the other, reciting guidebook factoids about Dangmai's average temperature and elevation as she goes, before walking around for so long that Kaili Blues merges timelines and settles on a street concert attended by more than one person who's no longer alive. Wang and Bi capture it with mesmeric handheld camerawork that gives the lay of the land while mapping several characters' inner lives, some of them long dead.

Perhaps one of the closest continuations of Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky's insistence on film as "sculpting in time," but where Tarkovsky sought to incite a sense of immensity and the sublime in films such as Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, Bi here takes a far more gentle, handcrafted, and playful approach. It's impressive and it's bold, but it's also delightfully skeptical of the concept of auteurist perfection.

Like the work of many young filmmakers, Bi Gan's debut feature pulsates with a cinephile's admiration for his predecessors: there are leisurely motorcycle rides reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, lonely locomotives borrowed from Hou Hsiao-hsien, and symbolic clocks out of Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild. Yet the voice resonating behind these familiar motifs is one of such dazzling originality, it's hard to emerge from this waking dream of a film without feeling the shock of the new.

In both Shahram Mokri's and Bi Gan's films [Fish and Cat and Kaili Blues, respectively], what makes the one-shot-sequence so exciting is not its continuity, but its découpage into a series of discrete scenes, that are, says Bi Gan, as many "planets" with "their climate, their water, their gravity, creating their own protagonists": Cheng and Weiwei on the bike, Cheng with Zhang Xi in the barber shop, Weiwei with Yangyang at the river…