Avis des critiques

What makes Elephant exceptional is Hu Bo’s piercing sensitivity to private doubts and anxieties, and his ability to make them visible on the faces of his complex, credible characters. That, and his skill in dovetailing strands of narrative – potentially melodramatic in themselves – into something that looks and feels like heightened cinéma vérité.

Chinese independent cinema is on the verge of extinction, which makes Hu Bo’s first and last feature film even more remarkable. A devastating counterpoint to the propagandistic frolic and box-office bonanza of franchises like Detective Chinatown or Wolf Warrior, [the film] paints a thankless portrait of contemporary China where many of the country’s glaring contradictions are exacerbated to the point of no return.

At the risk of letting An Elephant Sitting Still collapse under the weight of its advanced praise, it must be said that its post-Jia Zhangke sprawl does not entirely feel like that of a fully realized film; its director died prematurely. Yet through all the grays, its lived-in passion play of current wretchedness and mutual inhumanity has, when all is said and done, the powerful clarity of a simple equation.

The very opposite of sloppy, Hu’s opus is sprawling yet exceptionally focused, weaving an intricate networked narrative from the misfortunes suffered by four characters over the course of a single day in an economically depressed Chinese city.

Unmoored in time, viewers are stuck in a perpetual morass. The context for this bad mood is not unfamiliar: with its emphasis on chaos and sudden invitations to violence, Elephant recalls Huang Weikei’s Disorder and Jia's A Touch of Sin, among others. (“Among others” is a dodge; I’m not as familiar with as I’d like with the recent Chinese independent cinema I suspect this is in conversation with.)

It is difficult, naturally, to watch without a lingering awareness of the despair Bo must have felt while making it; the bleak, pitch-black melancholy that looms over the action is all the more disturbing in light of the real-life consequences. Still, Bo proves a gifted director, with a keen eye and audacious sensibility; the film’s fathomless misery is hard to shake, in its own way a significant achievement.

The writer and director Hu Bo puts these lives into motion with compassion, a restlessly moving camera and an intricate narrative that never feels overdetermined. As day edges into night, each character’s life comes into crystalline view, and the ordinary becomes profound. Wholly immersive, the movie has a foreboding four-hour running time that you’ll soon forget.

Each scene, whether it be a nasty argument or a desolate tour of some godforsaken corner, will last as long as Hu clearly felt it needs to, but his choices as to what constitutes a scene are uniquely his. A smoldering confrontation between Wang and members of Yu's gang looms for minutes and then suddenly snaps shut with the first thrust of a pool cue. We don't need to see the fight because, when Wang appears again all but unscathed, our hunch that he'll have been victorious will be confirmed.

Debut features seldom come as ambitious, or as accomplished, as An Elephant Sitting Still. . . . The cast of disaffected youths and petty criminals living in a stagnant former industrial city particularly recalls Unknown Pleasures, but Hu's chosen aesthetic and mode of storytelling are entirely his own. Staying close to the protagonists at all times, both literally and figuratively, the film patiently draws a profoundly empathetic portrait of human suffering that is at once epic and intimate.

Can a completely grueling experience be worth the effort, the investment of time and self? In the case of An Elephant Sitting Still . . . , we're talking about a four-hour story of such constant despair that not a single moment of joy or literal ray of sunlight pierces its desperate drama. But it is most definitely worth the ordeal. . . . This desire of some for release from life's onslaught of sorrow . . . can be felt in every single brutal minute of this sprawling film.

[It] makes me want to stop watching films because I don’t want to stain what I have seen with other films. I would like to keep this film as the last film I would ever see because it is so rich, so pure, so deep.