Still Life (2006)

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Two story lines with similarities that end differently. Each story concerns a man and a woman who are looking for their estranged partner in an area of China that is being demolished and is due to be flooded as part of a dam building program. Clearly change is inevitable but what will the outcomes be. One couple haven't seen each other for 2 years and decide to divorce. The other couple have previously divorced but decide to remarry.A realist film with occasionally surreal moments. The drama unfolds slowly with lingering shots of the everyday events from that region of China.Interesting but not riveting.

The film is shot in and around Fengjie, a town in Sichuan Province upstream from the 3 Gorges Dam Project and due to be flooded. The existing town was being demolished and the people relocated to "new Fengjie". The landscape of the river and the Gorges dominate the filmThe film follows 2 stories. Sanming is a coal miner from Shanxi who comes to Fengjie to try to find his ex wife who ran away 16 years previously. He wants to meet their daughter. He locates her brother on a ship in Fengjie who advises him to wait until his wife's ship returns. He joins a gang of labourers demolishing buildings and lives in a boarding house while waiting for his ex wife.Shen Hong is a nurse whose is trying to track down her husband Guo Bin who came to Fengjie 2 years ago. She has someone else in her life now and tracks down Guo Bin through his friend Wang Dongming so she can persuade him to divorce her. These stories run in parallel with each other but the characters never meet.The photography and the pace of the film make the viewer slow down and look for details as the camera unhurriedly pans across a vast landscape. The view is of the river dominated by precipitous hills, with the blocky concrete shapes of modern housing clinging to the slopes. In the context of the Three Gorges Dam project, a vast undertaking affecting millions of people, so the camera captures the vastness of the landscape that humans are struggling to tame. The landscape is a constant and oppressive presence that refuses to go away. The river flows on regardless of what people do.The characters are frequently filmed simply in front of the camera with the view of river and hills in the background maintaining the feeling of the vastness of nature and the smallness of people, reminiscent of the style of traditional Chinese ink painting.When scenes change away from landscapes, the people are framed up in the empty windows of abandoned houses, overlooking demolished buildings, or up against piles of rubble. The chaos of demolition contrasts with the efforts of the people to maintain the routines of their lives, eating, working, sleeping, socializing. The camera in its slow long takes of people looks for details in their lives. These are not heavily made up characters, in fact they are shown just as they are with the rough hewn physiques of manual labourers, bad teeth, scars from the school of hard knocks. The camera lingers like an observer on individuals, allowing the audience time to get to know them and their mannerisms.The dialogue between the personalities is sparse and reticent, with long pauses in which all the unspoken questions are aired and acknowledged. An example of this is the conversation between Sanming and Missy Ma when they meet after 16 years of separation. In this brief exchange this couple find they still have a future together. The undercurrent in these conversations is like the undercurrent of the river, hidden but acknowledged and always moving on. Further on in a scene in a derelict building Ma offers Sanming a White Rabbit toffee which he accepts bites in two and share it with her. With this simple gesture they agree to reactivate their relationship. As they do, suddenly a tall building in the far background is blown up and collapses, suggesting the end of the old and the potential for a new start.The soundtrack compliments the film and provides reminders of themes. A traditional song plays as the tourist ships moves up through the Gorges but it is interspersed with the sounds of demolition. The background to the characters is punctuated by horn blasts from ferries and ships moving out, a scene of labourers hammering down walls has a soundtrack of machinery overlaid onto it. The soundtrack maintains the pace of the film giving the audience a feeling of relentless movement, of the progress of events. In the interaction between the couples, romantic music is heard.The film is rich in symbolism. The characters for liquor, tea, cigarettes, and toffee appear at critical junctions and mirror traditional Chinese elements of life like rice, cooking oil, fuel and salt. Attributed to "Chinese Wasteland" by Shelley Kraicer http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs29/feat_kraicer_still.html accessed 07/09/2010There is a scene where Shen Hong walks past men are rhythmically hammering to no purpose at an abandoned industrial plant. Both Sanming and Shen Hong in their quest for resolutions to their respective relationship problems encounter a young boy wandering aimlessly singing a romantic songThe director wanders into the surreal at times, with the appearance of a UFO streaking across the sky behind Shen Hong. In the restaurant where Sanming waits for his friend, there is the incongruous sight of actors in full Chinese Opera costumes playing Nintendo games The strange building Hong can see from Wang Dongming's apartment, suddenly becomes a rocket ship and blasts off when she turns away, and, at the end of the film as Sanming and his friends are leaving, he turns and sees the incongruous sight of a high wire artist walking a wire strung between two buildings in the process of demolition.Dominant impressions I got from this film were a sense of the vastness of China and Chinese society, the smallness of the humans on the landscape, the relative insignificance of their hopes and dreams. Progress seems like a juggernaut, relentlessly moving onward, pushing aside the people and their hopes for a good life. The river serves as a metaphor for progress. The illuminating factor is the quiet courage of the people as they deal with the circumstances they have to live with, and despite these adverse times push on with their efforts to have a good life.

Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia's latest film contains a wealth of fascinating real-life imagery. Still Life was filmed during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China and it reveals to Western audiences the astonishing destruction that this entailed. The submersion of the scenery and settlements of the valley floors proceeds in phases during the film. White lines are painted on buildings and cliff-faces to forewarn of the next projected rise in water levels; residents are forced from their homes at short notice. Buildings are torn down using sledgehammers and hard human labour, creating a bizarre landscape of broken masonry. Rubble, the raw material of the future, is carted along narrow city streets by overloaded lorries and dumped onto a fleet of cargo ships. In the wake of all this activity there lie towns and communities divided literally in two by the swelling waters.Still Life is an amazing documentary of the construction of the Dam, but its narrative is disappointingly weak. So many of the characters that fill the screen are isolated or antagonistic or exploitative, from the man hawking foreign currencies to the architect proudly admiring the new bridge across town. Jia chooses to focus on two main characters, creating two loosely intertwined plots. In the first, a husband and father searches for his wife and daughter who left him some fifteen years previously, whilst in the second an abandoned wife searches for her missing husband.These are potentially interesting stories, but they proceed at a pace that is slow even by the standards of Jia's other films. Much of the drama in these stories precedes the film itself and the camera often lingers on unmoving, unspeaking subjects. The effect is one of inertia, at first strangely engrossing, but eventually frustrating. Possibly in an attempt to alleviate the slow, slow pacing of Still Life, Jia introduces some quirky asides (watch out for the spaceship taking off), but these jar with his documentary-like approach to film-making. Rather more effective are the 'still life' moments that crop up periodically throughout the film, momentarily framing day-to-day objects such as cigarettes or tea.Although achingly slow at times, Still Life does make some interesting observations. It is intriguing to see how pop culture, transmitted by television and radio, now provides the icons for young Chinese people, where once one might have expected the songs, the sayings and the thinking to derive from Communist figureheads. The boy singing romantic pop ballads and the young man imitating a TV cop show character are symbolic of a very different culture among the young people of China. As with Jia's other films, the ideology and rhetoric of the Communist Party are largely absent, making a sort of cameo appearance when an old-fashioned workers' song plays as the ring tone on one character's mobile phone.On the other hand, we see very little protest against the construction of the dam under the gaze of the Communist Party. This is not a slight against Jia, however, since it would have been very difficult to portray this without the government intervening against his film. The unflattering portrayal of the Dam's construction and its debilitating influence on people are a wake-up call to the severe side effects of Progress.

SXHR is a demonstration of Jia's skills, from the construction of scenes, supporting sound effects. The reality is properly reflected but noise and distraction are also eliminated. What's more, he has a clear control over the whole thread. Though the plot is carried out in strict time order without many postmodern sequencing tricks, it feels comfortable and natural. Not big story but various interactions, conflicts and contracts can be seen in subtleties. This reminds me of the classic "Godfather".Many renowned Chinese directors have grown old and lost the passions seen in their early works. This is inevitable given their ages and change of living environments. Luckily the young generation has taken over. China is changing every second and that should be the ground for great movies.