AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (Da xiang xi di er zuo)
A
China (230 mi) 2018 d: Hu Bo
I’ve been pondering
why I was there and looking for ways in the wastelands where I can go, and I am
convinced that everything is more than just disappointment with the present.
―Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) from Hu Bo’s novel Huge Crack (Fissures), 2017
Arguably the most blistering social critique of alienated
youth ever committed to celluloid, a grim and heartbreaking story of troubled
adolescents with no adult role models, as they are all hypocrites, part of the
moral rot of an aging system of rampant political corruption that has no
interest whatsoever in solving social problems, preferring instead to find ways
to keep important figures from being blamed in the day-to-day turmoil that
exists, allowing them to maintain prestigious positions for keeping their
mouths shut and never ratting anybody out. This is how those at the top
remain protected, as there is a code of silence at local bureaucratic levels if
those individuals expect to keep their jobs. Within this framework,
children are raised with no expectations, none whatsoever, knowing their
hopeless lives are “fucked,” having no place to turn to set things straight, as
every available avenue is entrenched in the same one-party totalitarian system
where you do as you’re told, not in any way or shape dream of what someone
might aspire to, as that’s completely off limits, something happening only in
the West, as China couldn’t be more set in their ways, with an underlying
criminal element actually in charge, ruling by force, all but guaranteeing
uniform conformity, especially in rural areas where there is little economic
opportunity to begin with. What makes this film so potent is the complete
lack of artifice, very atypical in that there’s not a hint of melodrama,
jam-packed with introspective detail, novelesque in tone, brilliantly edited by
this first-time director, enclosed in the claustrophobic confines of an
industrial town that resembles a prison environment, like being stuck in an
inescapable labyrinth, given an epic structure, unfolding in just under four
hours, yet the entire film takes place in the course of a single
day. In a word, what describes this film the most is authentic,
given a rarely viewed cesspool of social dysfunction, yet the immersion into a
black hole of discontent is near complete. Shot in washed out colors by
cinematographer Fan Chao, the use of hand-held cameras adds a degree of
immediacy, as does the brilliant interlude music by Hua Lun, providing sharp
tonal contrasts between scenes, accentuating an existential crisis in full
throttle mode. While there are stand-out moments, the one that comes to
mind is when a lead character wanders out to the edge of town and yells
profanities at the top of his voice, “Fuck you!!” at what a dead-end, shithole
place this is, framed by a moving train on the left, and a highway running past
a giant industrial factory on the right, all the ways in and out of this
hellish purgatory on earth. Relentlessly bleak, it’s as defiant a take as
can be found on the toxic reverberations of the modern world.
Difficult to digest, there is no manufactured drama here, as
it’s all excrutiatingly real, extremely well-written and performed, leaving a
long-lasting impression that is unmistakably honest and ferociously truthful,
conveying an unfiltered artistic vision rarely seen anywhere else. A
disciple of Béla Tarr’s long take without the wry sardonic humor, yet the dire
effects of the fall of Communism in SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), a morose tale of woe
that comes to resemble an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenario and the epic
use of extended time thematically relates to this material as well, each
poetically revealing a suffocating desperation, a last gasp. Easily the most
heartbreaking aspects of the film are the circumstances regarding its
distribution, with early promoter and producer Wang Xiaoshuai and his wife Liu
Ye preferring that the director trim the four-hour length into something more
commercially acceptable like a two-hour version. After making repeated
cuts and several painful attempts to comply the filmmaker took his own life at
the age of 29, hanging himself with a rope in the stairwell of his apartment,
having written two novels under the pen name Hu Qian (one more published
posthumously), also three shorts, and one lone feature film. After Hu’s
death, the producers relinquished the rights to the film to the director’s
parents (as stated in the credits) who insisted upon maintaining the director’s
original vision of the film, premiering at the Berlin Film Festival in its full
four-hour length, winning a FIPRESCI award and an award for the best first
feature, while also winning the best feature film and best adapted screenplay
awards at the Golden Horse Film Festival in 2018. With Wang Xiaoshuai’s
production company removed from the credits, no one has said it clearer than
Brian Raven Ehrenpreis from The Quietus,
None
More Bleak: Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still - The Quietus, “In the
cruelest of ironies, it was only Hu’s death that allowed An Elephant Sitting Still to survive.” Equally painful to
consider, the exhaustive detail of the hell and anguish he lived through exists
only because he lived the way he did, persevering through it all, finding it
all so meaningless, yet his tender compassion for the hapless characters he
created and his uncompromising search for meaning and truth through a
Kafkaesque world that made little sense is immeasurable.
Seemingly born out of Jia Zhang-ke’s UNKNOWN PLEASURES
(2002), an unflinching look at disillusioned youth, this film is etched with
Dostoyevskian psychological depth and personal autobiographic detail, with some
describing the film as his “suicide note” left behind, adding an underlying
poignancy to the viewing experience, yet the blunt force of the original
aesthetic is what prevails, as this is a fully accomplished work that serves as
a wake-up call to all who enter into its extraordinary complexity and artistic
reach, achieving a rare intimacy with the viewing audience. Adapting a
story from his acclaimed novel, Huge
Crack (Fissures), bookended by a mythical tale of an elephant that sits
passively, impervious to others, even those poking at it, residing at a zoo in
the northern town of Manzhouli near the Mongolian border, perhaps a metaphoric
image of survival, offering the briefest glimpse of hope, yet the tale has an
omniscient quality about it, like the oversized whale in Béla Tarr’s
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), suggesting the power of irrational forces that
may intrude into the bleak reality of our existence. Following the lives
of a group of high school students, Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) is berated by his father
from the moment he awakes, called a good-for-nothing, accused of theft, which
he calmly denies, which only inflames the anger of his father, painting a
miserable depiction of parenthood. In another corner of town friendship
is betrayed, as local thug Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu) looks on while his best friend,
whose wife he just slept with, leaps out the window to his death. This
incident supercharges the opening with what feels like a pent-up nihilistic
rage (though the film resists that notion), followed by a pathetic expression
of cold-hearted ingratitude when a daughter and son-in-law plead with her aging
father, Wang Jin (Liu Congxi), to move into a nursing home, allowing them more
space, all but kicking him out of the house, which, he reminds them both, is his apartment, while their precocious
young daughter (Kong Yixin) actually prefers his company. At the high school, we see a group of bullying
tormentors led by Yu Shuai (Zhang Xiaolong) harass weaker students, forcing
them into demeaning servitude, like publically performing humiliating menial
duties out in the open for all the other students to laugh and jeer, accusing
Li Kai (Ling Zhenghui) of stealing his cell phone. Wei Bu comes to his
friend’s defense, claiming he’s not a thief, and actually stands up to him,
pushing him away at one point and the bully falls down the stairs, leaving him
gravely injured (and eventually dies), though no police are called, preferring
to handle the matter discreetly (meaning no school administrators are
blamed).
The assistant dean (Xiang Rongdong) interviews Wei Bu,
reminding him of the dead-end future that’s in store for him, informing him the
school’s about to shut down and merge with a much better school, where most
kids from this low performing high school will end up becoming street food
vendors, while he’ll get a larger and more comfortable office at the new
school. Even though it was an accident, the incident is described as a
fight, with Wei Bu beating up Yu Shuai, whose older brother Yu Cheng will come
looking for revenge, perhaps aiming to kill him. From the stream of
insults that were hurled by his nemesis, Wei Bu learns for the first time that
his morally superior father was actually fired from his job due to his
involvement with bribery scandals. Deciding he can’t live at home
anymore, Wei Bu goes on the run, first asking a female classmate Huang Ling
(Wang Yuwen) if she’ll run away with him, but she sees no future in that,
especially considering his desperate situation. Later in the film,
however, a video goes viral revealing a hushed-up affair between Huang Ling and
the married vice dean, making them both the centerpiece of yet another lurid
scandal with a destructive capacity to seriously damage their futures.
Ling’s confessional scene to her mother is a picture of the grotesque, as her
alcoholic mother really couldn’t care less, thinking only of herself and her
own troubles. But when the vice dean and his wife come knocking on her
door, that’s a whole different matter entirely, erupting into a screaming
fiasco, each side accusing the other, filmed as one of the more memorable
scenes in the film, with Ling slipping out the back door, but so incensed at
what she hears, she grabs a baseball bat lying on the ground and returns inside
their apartment and bashes both of the intruders, handling it the way the mafia
might in a surprise assault, leaving her mother’s mouth agape as she
confidently struts back out the door again, fully committed to never returning
to that home again. In what may be the metaphor for the film, a
dog-eat-dog world, Wang Jin is out walking his dog when a bigger dog on the
loose comes flying out of an alleyway in full attack mode, viciously killing
his poor animal on the spot, leaving him in a puddle of blood. The owners
of the attack animal have placed photos of their missing dog all over town, but
when Wang Jin visits them to report what happened, they fly off in a rage about
how he’s trying to blackmail them for money, vowing to kill the man if they
ever see him again. These vile threats and unending contemptible behavior
come to define the world we’re living in, as the empowered are overly
protective of their favored status, which they cling to by constantly
threatening those weaker and more vulnerable than they are, creating a layer of
outcasts who simply don’t belong, commanding no respect whatsoever. What
are they supposed to do? None of the empowered take responsibility for
their repulsive and reprehensible acts, even if their divisiveness creates
worlds of divide between the rich and the poor, where the poor and victimized
will always be blamed.
Much like the realist films of Filipino filmmaker Lino
Brocka made during the martial law clampdown of the Marcos era, Hu Bo fuses his
own brutally demanding realist, cinéma vérité style with suggestions that
continual unabated mistreatment leads to dire consequences with violent
outbursts, leaving gaping fissures or cracks that destabilize the fundamental
health of any society. Arrests, murders, and suicide rip families apart
and leave their mark, especially when the offending party escapes culpability,
leaving them free to wreak even more havoc on the next generation, leaving a
battered and bullied nation literally traumatized from the heaping levels of
abuse. Characters throughout this film spew references to this list of
casualties and feeling of utter abandonment, as if they’ve been banished to an
island of lost souls, tossed out and rejected, literally disassociating
themselves from the rest of the world. One of the more ominous sequences,
beautifully presented, is Wang Jin’s spontaneous visit to the nursing home,
where it’s difficult to see any sense of organization or structure, as people
left adrift act as if they’ve been abandoned, as he goes room by room, with
long tracking shots following at a glacier pace, where the loneliness and
isolation are painfully evident, leaving an open scar of mammoth
proportions. Why would anyone wish to subject themselves to this dismal
and depressing place, where old people are left to die, miserable and
alone. So much is exposed in this film, where all age groups are covered,
becoming a cry of anguish from the wilderness, with viewers feeling the
volcanic onslaught of a corrosive bitterness that simply annihilates anyone in
its path. There is precious little love to be found anywhere in this
film, existing in small moments, never the focal point of a shot, yet it exists
on the periphery, resembling the way the film is shot, with someone in focus
near the front of the screen, while lingering in the background are blurry
shadows that either remain that way or walk closer to the camera, their figures
coming into focus as recognizable characters. There’s a dizzyingly dreary
look to this town, faded with decay, with a prevalent mood suggesting it’s
disappearing into nothingness. Much of the dialogue reflects this
overriding sense of despair, with one student (the humiliated boy forced to
capitulate to the bully earlier) spontaneously erupting with an unprovoked
remark, “The world is a wasteland.” While it’s an ordeal to sit through,
an emotional blitzkrieg, what’s perhaps most challenging is the idea that
people find none of this out of the ordinary, as several characters suggest
this is the normal order of things, that you have to learn to put up with it,
which apparently is what separates adults from kids, as they’ve figured out how
to remain impassive to the surrounding cruelty. We hear the cynical voice
of the vice dean describe how it is to Ling, “I want you to know that daily
routines have been the same across the ages…Life just won't get better.
It’s all about agony. That agony has begun since you were born. You
think that a new place will change your fate? It’s bullshit. New
place, new sufferings. You understand? No one truly knows about
existence.” These thoughts echo to anyone fixated on the thought that
life is better off somewhere else, like an elusive dream continually fading out
of view. Nonetheless, with nowhere else to go, several of them converge
on the idea of escaping to Manzhouli, the home of the mythical elephant that
may or may not exist, yet that sliver of hope may be all they have.
