Still Life (Sanxia haoren)

 

Director Jia Zhang-ke in Venice

 

 

 

STILL LIFE (Sanxia haoren)         A                                                                                      China  Hong Kong  (111 mi)  2006  d: Jia Zhang-ke

A very slow, languorous film shot entirely in high definition digital video and blown up to 35mm by Yu Lik-wai, who also shot Jia’s earlier features, that hypnotically captures the rich colors of the region along with a solemn, funereal feel throughout, sort of the exact opposite of Kiarostami’s AND LIFE GOES ON (1992), another fictionalized film that was shot in the middle of devastating destruction, the aftereffects of a deadly Iranian earthquake.  But while Kiarostami’s film searched through the ruins of destruction for any semblance of life, finding rebuilding, restoration projects everywhere that upliftingly reaffirmed one’s faith in man, Jia’s film seems to be set in the tombs, revealing instead a people in the process of demolishing an entire civilization, evicting all the residents from Fengjie, an ancient 2000 year old city, relocating them (1.5 million and still counting, while dismantling thirteen major cities) without really keeping track of where they’re heading, creating an unprecedented government-imposed upheaval on a massive scale, something that might be expected during wartime, but certainly not due to a modernization project of building the world’s largest hydroelectric dam that will eventually leave the entire city underwater.  The film resembles, to some degree, the deeply felt, existential alienation in the face of technological modernization in Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), as both are profound sensory experiences where mood takes precedence over any narrative, yet like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), also made in the 60’s, Jia scripts his fictional film in the middle of this already partially submerged, real-life demolition project introducing two characters searching for missing spouses who they haven’t seen in years, a recording of memory as it is happening, with humorous references to John Woo’s A BETTER TOMORROW (1986).  In a film like this, locations are everything, as nearly every frame of the film captures the stunning mountainous beauty of the vicinity, called the Three Gorges region due to gorges spectacularly coming together along the Yangtze River, a scene depicted on the back of a ten yuan note in Chinese currency, but every frame is also a time capsule for a lost civilization, which is hauntingly still thriving before extinction as we see the people scrambling about the city streets in a bustle of activity, but there are horizontal lines affixed to tall buildings ominously showing where the water line will be in the next phase of construction, where everything under that line will be submerged in water.  In eerie fashion, everything below that line is being destroyed, while everything above that line has a tenuous hold on life, a metaphor for upward mobility in modern China, as everyone is scrambling to reach higher ground, shown in a flurry of feverish activity which may as well separate the rich from the poor, accentuating the vulnerability of impoverished residents of the region, as the poor continue to inhabit the low lying regions.   

Winner of the Golden Lion (1st place) at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, arriving in the U.S. two years later, what makes this film so unusual is the ponderous nature of the way it is filmed, full of curiosity and questions in the slow observational pans that combine intimate portraits of ordinary citizens set against this continual destruction of what used to be a vital city, literally tearing it apart brick by brick while looming off in the distance is the omnipresent stillness of this extraordinary natural landscape which is nothing short of breathtaking.   Without ever offering details or statistics, which can easily be provided by journalists, there is instead an enveloping sadness permeating through every image, as sweaty, shirtless men are paid meager wages to use sledgehammers to reduce a city to dust and rubble reminiscent of Rossellini’s post-war GERMANY YEAR ZERO (1948), an industrial wasteland of epic proportions causing the region to be perpetually enveloped in low-lying clouds, but also men whose idle time is spent smoking cigarettes or eating noodles, chatting feverishly while playing mahjong as the camera slowly shifts its attention and gazes at any number of barges floating down the river carrying commercial goods, all shown with a poetic detachment that objectively offers no point of view, yet it’s clear the collective is valued over the individual.  The implementation of market reforms from the late 70’s and early 80’s led to an ascension of capitalist entrepreneurs with political ties and nearly unlimited power to seize land for private and state projects, leading to a massive influx of migrant laborers to help fuel China’s industrial and construction boom, as reflected in Jia’s earlier film THE WORLD (2004).  Listed at #2 from Cahiers du Cinéma’s Top 10 list of the Best Pictures of 2007, using chapter headings of cigarettes, liquor, tea, and toffee, items associated with New Year’s celebrations, all perishable goods that symbolize quickly disappearing happiness to ordinary people, where there is a very calm and meditative aspect to this film, like the passing of time happening right before our eyes, representing the enormous space that exists between the two protagonists who visit Three Gorges, a space that remains throughout the film, seemingly unbridgeable, like the people lost in the landscape.  The characters inhabiting the film are all morally ambiguous, with some fueled with a chaotic energy, where they may be both victimized and also perpetrators of violence, as extorting newcomers to the region and taking advantage of their unfamiliarity appears to be a common practice.  Using diegetic sound as part of the score, the incessant pounding of hammers demolishing brick buildings is a continual backdrop, mixed with a nostalgic feel from interjected pop songs that also fade away over time, where past and present intertwine throughout the film, suggesting we are living in transient times, where what we see today will be gone tomorrow.  Jia’s film showcases his ability to provoke a re-examination of the relationship between real and fictional narratives, and also between personal memories and the collective historical record.

The magnificent opening handheld shot is a long circular pan of densely packed bodies on a ferry boat that is both meandering and meditative, slowly observing the passengers traveling down a river in a collective group collage, fusing landscape and portrait imagery, where the frenetic energy of their conversations is a stark contrast to the serenity of the water, as the camera lingers on long shots of the river and the stillness of the passing landscapes.  At the very front of the boat, isolated from the rest, sits Sanming (Han Sanming, the director’s actual coal mining cousin), a working class coal miner who comes to the city searching for his missing wife of 16 years, also a daughter that he’s never seen.  When he realizes the street where she used to live is submerged underwater, he enlists the aid of fellow citizens, eventually joining one of the demolition crews himself, just one of many shirtless low paid workers swinging sledge-hammers.  His lower class pattern of living routinely includes bartering and sharing, offering bottles of liquor to express gratitude to officials or handing out individual cigarettes to friends, where living in such claustrophobic close quarters means the concept of privacy is non-existent.  His personal business becomes the business of everyone around him, as he has to be accepted by the group before he can ever hope of succeeding in his mission.  Whether he succeeds or not remains ambiguous to the viewers, but the unusual way his story comes together is handled beautifully, with a calm understatement and a potent underlying emotional reserve, pushing specific aspects of cinematic realism, the long take, deep focus, non-professional actors, the use of real time, while offering a subjective perspective on the conditions of life.  Zhao Tao, who would become the director’s wife (married in 2012), doesn’t appear until an hour into the film, a recurring character in all Jia features since PLATFORM (2000), playing Shen Hong, a nurse, an educated, independent-minded, middle-aged women who hasn’t seen her husband in two years, meeting one of his old friends, archaeologist Dongming (Wang Hongwei, one of Jia’s classmates from the Beijing Film Academy, and the star of Jia’s XIAO WU in 1997) to ask him for help in finding her husband, whose slowly developing offscreen profile is an unusual way to introduce a character, as we discover Guo Bin (Li Zhubin) is a corrupt, hot-shot official who is actively involved in the forced eviction of stubborn residents, while his boss Ding Ya-ling is a wealthy female investor, where both have become rich through their participation of the demolition of the Three Gorges cities. Maintaining a great deal of power in the region, his hesitancy to meet with Shen Hong is understandable, as he finally comes out of hiding and meets with her against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam, the only time it’s shown in the film, suggesting the dam itself is the cause of the couple’s strife, a subtle hint that it is not yet fully operational, yet it is a testimony to China’s remarkable economic growth.  She discovers he’s likely having an affair with Ding, but Shen Hong’s motive for being there remains a mystery through most of the film.  Despite his elevated economic status, her manner of classic stoicism keeps him continually off guard, never knowing what to expect, as she retains the upper hand, a fact that may well explain why he left in the first place. 

Continuing in Jia’s contemplative quest to intermix the personal with the historical, he integrates a mixture of traditional Chinese painting and poetry, Cultural Revolution imagery, Canto-pop songs, as well as 1980’s and 90’s television, revealing an intersection of the real and the imagined, also the past, present, and future, which represents an evolving realist style.  His first three films took place in Shanxi province where the director was born (his parents were sent there during the Cultural Revolution, with dislocation becoming a key ingredient to his films), made without official government approval and were banned in China, described as underground projects, yet all show the shattering impact of China’s attempts to modernize in rural interior regions.  Both characters in this film are traveling from Shanxi, shown in parallel stories as each is attempting to repair broken relationships, where the future seen through differing class perspectives offers diverging possibilities, as Jia examines the disparities of class, with both protagonists representing opposite ends of the economic ladder, as Shen Hong’s husband heads the construction project, while Sanming toils in the bottom rung of the day-to-day demolition.  Accordingly, it’s easier for Shen Hong to adapt to the rapid transformations, while Sanming is more culturally isolated and completely uncomfortable with modernity, finding it easier to cling to the past than to adjust.  Through the sheer mastery of what the filmmaker is able to compress into each shot, we are constantly reminded of what’s at stake building such a mammoth project in the middle of such overwhelming, magisterial beauty, and what utter gall it takes to intentionally displace so many people from their homes and their history as a matter of public policy, literally reducing 2000 years of history to rubble before it disappears from sight altogether, taking a tremendous human gamble by betting it all on the future.  Over the past three decades, China has been transforming itself from an agricultural economy to an increasingly industrialized and urbanized country.  The film is not so much about the existential malaise of THE WORLD as it is a way to frame progress in real time, where it’s an open question whether this can stand the test of time.  Initially proposed almost 90 years ago by Sun Yat-sen in 1919, part of his “Plan to Develop Industry,” which aimed to address flooding and harness the Yangtze River’s power for national development, supported by Chinese leaders like Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, actual construction began in 1994 and was finally completed in 2012.  Shot in 2006 with work still in progress, Jia was able to film midway through the largest public works project in human history.  The consequences are enormous, both pro and con, and the idea that China, normally not known for their progressive views, would allow this most brilliantly independent of Chinese filmmakers into the region knowing the unpredictability of his artistic and political views, at least through their point of view, and yet it happened, approved by the Chinese Film Bureau and co-produced by the state-operated Shanghai Film Studio, where the result is this quietly probing, utterly realistic, yet near surreal, non-narrative essay that explores the region through visual imagery and broken marriages, where the challenge to viewers is that they will also have to decide what is worth salvaging in their own lives and what they may need to let go. 

One of the more modern images of the film is seen at an evening penthouse party on an outdoor balcony directly overlooking a giant suspension bridge that spans the river.  As it caters to the rich and powerful, Zhao Tao believes her husband could be there.  Instead another powerbroker arrives on the scene and expresses dismay that the bridge is not lit up for his VIP’s.  A quick cell phone call obtains instant results and the bridge lights up like a birthday cake, emblematic of state-of-the-art technology.  Another somewhat surreal image is an empty, gigantic structure which may have once housed building occupants, but it has long been abandoned and is left standing alone towering over a barren field where kids play.  At one point, this monstrosity of a structure simply fires up burners at the bottom and takes off, like some kind of mysterious UFO and vanishes from view, defying all known concepts of space and time.  Given the quasi-documentary aesthetic of the filmmaker, this is nothing less than shocking, while there is also an image that is almost identical to Kiarostami’s AND LIFE GOES ON, where a beautiful green landscape can be seen through a broken-down window of the earthquake rubble that reveals sheep grazing peacefully in the fields, where signs of hope can literally be seen through the ruins, with haunting Arabic music providing a profound sense of something sacred.  Jia, on the other hand, shows a married couple in a crumbling structure of a half-demolished building with a missing wall several stories high, embracing near a similar broken-down window in the ruins that overlooks the skyline of this city, when one of the tallest buildings seen off in the distance suddenly collapses.  As this is the place where Han and his ex-wife (Ma Lizhen) finally meet, he is unable to answer her queries about why he waited so long to look for her, becoming a metaphor for Han’s powerlessness in the face of China’s transformation.  Unlike Jia’s earlier films, which are about fringe characters who are aimless and adrift, defined by their nonchalance, these are stronger and more mature protagonists who are well integrated into Chinese society.  What’s unique about this filmmaker is that he makes films about ordinary people cast adrift by China’s social and economic changes, people whose lives are disrupted and have no choice but to adjust, change, and literally move on with their lives.  Over the course of five fiction films and some documentaries, Jia has risen from the initial position of chronicler of a Chinese youth without a future to a historian with a look not only at the present, but to the future.  Shot in parallel with Jia’s documentary DONG (2006), both touching on common elements and themes, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, yet in scope and depth they venture into unchartered territory, where this is more impressionistic and elusively mysterious than any feature Jia has made to date.  One must mention the otherworldly musical score by Lim Giong on his second Jia film, formerly working with Hou Hsiao-hsien, including some irresistible sequences scored to romantic pop music songs.  The supreme image is left for the finale, however, where off in the distance a man inexplicably performs a high-wire act walking between two tall buildings that are likely targeted for demolition, another improbable balance between high and low or the sacred and the profane.

Crosscurrent (長江圖, Chang jiang tu)

Writer/director Yang Chao

CROSSCURRENT (長江圖, Chang jiang tu)                       A-                                              China  (116 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d:  Yang Chao

Time, like a river, flows both day and night.

A moody, atmospheric, yet breathtakingly beautiful film shot on 35mm (among the last of the Chinese films shot on celluloid) in ‘Scope by Mark Lee Ping-Bing, who also shot Hou Hsiao-hsien’s utterly enthralling 2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), with Hou developing a lifelong collaboration with the cinematographer which began with A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985), while also recognized for sharing shooting duties with Christopher Doyle on Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000).  With little narrative to speak of, the film is largely a meditative tone poem of a lengthy 1200 mile river journey from the mouth of the Yangtze River in Shanghai, the third longest river in the world, and the longest to flow entirely within one country, traveling all the way to Yibin where the river meets the Min River.  A contrast of modernity and tradition, nature and technology, enhanced by spectacular visual poetry, the river is given a mythical context from the outset, interspersed with passages from poems identifiable by the towns where they were written, much like Bi Gan’s 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) (2015), reflecting a Buddhist interchangeability in all things, where Gao Chun (Qin Hao) loses his father, inheriting the captaincy of a rusty river barge, a cargo transport vehicle, yet we are told his father’s soul will never be at peace until a black fish caught in the river by his son is placed in an incense bowl, unfed, and dies a natural death.  While at anchor in Shanghai harbor, Chun spots a beguiling young woman on another boat, An Lu (Xin Zhilei), but departs before he has a chance to speak to her.  While attempting to repair an auxiliary motor, he discovers an old handwritten collection of poems (all written by the director) from an earlier time entitled Map of the Yangtze River, which is the Chinese film title, a diary written by a previous deckhand describing his thoughts about the river and a mysterious young woman, conveying a vague sense of loss.  As he travels further along the river, following the same journey as the author of the poems, he reads passages from the book, growing more obsessed with the young woman that he continually finds waiting for him along the way, developing a sexual rapport, yet she remains elusive, until it is impossible to distinguish fiction from reality, as they all blend into one, using a magical realist style that resembles a dream language of the river.  The sound design is equally remarkable, with a constant sound of motors on the water, where there is a heightened sensory experience, shot in the dead of winter where characters are always wearing heavy coats with scarfs, where you can see their breath in the cold.  Like some kind of River Styx, transporting souls from the living to the underworld, the river seems to possess supernatural powers, with the river captain attempting to navigate his own path, yet the life of the river, given this unfathomable context, becomes vibrant and mysteriously alive, where the ravishing beauty in this enveloping universe is simply indescribable. 

Winner of a Silver Bear at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for the cinematography, the aesthetic superlatives are mind-boggling, as are the multi-layered sound effects, creating an orchestrated cacophony of sounds at sea that become quite sophisticated, allowing viewers an existential view of the river passage, largely wordless with poetic incantations, where you’re able to disappear into someone else’s identity while blending into the majestic landscape, like air, land, and water having a symbiotic relationship with each other.  Much of it shot at night, the use of a searchlight or fire onshore in the mountains brilliantly illuminates a living spirit that feeds the void of emptiness.  At some point they pick up a mysterious cargo, demanding extra payment for the danger incurred, but the contents are never revealed, yet this adds a layer of suspense.  Uncle Xiang (Jiang Hualin), the ship’s mechanic who worked for Chun’s late father, and a younger deckhand Wu Sheng (Wu Lipeng) are the only others onboard, yet they rarely engage one another in conversation, adding to the silent mystery.  Due to a lack of a coherent story, many viewers may be perplexed and baffled by the pervasive emptiness of content, meandering, seemingly going nowhere, where they may find themselves lost in a netherworld with no way out, with many viewers finding it hollow and overly pretentious.  With films like this, the poem translations are a key element, as they may leave many hanging in a world of incoherence, struggling to find meaning or purpose, finding it incomprehensible.  But don’t believe the critics, whose contempt for this film basically killed its chances of international distribution, screening at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2016 where it sold out, but was never shown anywhere else after that except New York and Los Angeles.  This is a film to watch and make up your own mind, as it defies convenient categorization, but it’s challenging, somewhat abstract, yet ultimately a highly rewarding experience.  All films need not be explained, which is actually a refreshing and invigorating touch, allowing viewers themselves to navigate the murky waters of such a languorous, dreamlike journey, open to multiple interpretations, a blank slate filled with symbolism and recurring images, where a life on the water is its own mystical experience, yet it feels as much like an investigation into the mystery of the human soul.  At one point Chun can hear, but not see An Lu speaking to a monk in a Buddhist pagoda, asking spiritual questions, yet he feels trapped on another floor, like being caught in a labyrinth, with sound his only sensory connection.  By the time he finds his way to the monk she has disappeared.  The director continually drops little hints, like pieces of a puzzle, that when strung together reveal a larger whole, yet through most of the film Chun feels distant, melancholy, and lost, disconnected from the whole, in search of the perpetually missing piece.  As they move from town to town, they are identified by name onscreen, like chapter headings, where there is also an indicator of the number of days on the journey, the last being the 98th day.  

An Wei writes musical passages for the film, dark and melancholic, with lonely cello-infused music by David Darling (who just died recently in January 2021) from his Dark Wood album added as well, David Darling - Darkwood - 1995 on Vimeo YouTube (44:36), offering lyrical depth underneath the lush visual palette.  Passing through relocated villages, Chun eventually makes a grueling two-day passage through the Three Gorges Dam, a gigantic hydro-electric project where homes have been meticulously and tirelessly relocated brick by brick to higher locations, each one numbered, as otherwise they will forever be submerged underwater after the dam’s completion, requiring a massive displacement of 1.3 million people to new locations, where a town literally disappears only to reappear elsewhere.  Perhaps the most ominous moment occurs at the Three Gorges Dam, with the barge engulfed in one of the locks that suddenly fills with water, yet the grating mechanical sounds of the large gate opening could just as easily be the gates of Hell, yet suddenly a whole new world opens.  The farther along the journey the more vague and mystifying it becomes, like a Heart of Darkness journey, growing even more contemplative with an interior focus, at one point growing surreal.  An Lu is seen along the way in different incarnations, continually disappearing only to reappear again, always recognizable, like an elusive object of desire, eventually existing only in his own mind, which is where she may have always been, as who or what she is has always remained obscure.  A hint may come early on when she throws herself into the water, an apparent suicide attempt, but afterwards we see a miraculous swimmer who seems unfazed by traveling great distances, where she assumes supernatural powers.  After a heated argument Wu Sheng falls overboard, with no sign or trace of him, but the next morning An Lu suddenly reappears out of the water, possibly capable of disappearing into someone else’s identity, which matches a parable told in one of the poems, a ghost story of a girl who crept into the body of a merchant, again reflecting an interchangeability in spirits.  Uncle Xiang is plagued by the journey’s bad omens, leaving a note that he has left without explanation, jettisoning the illegal cargo.  Arriving in Yibin with no cargo, the shady business partner has sent someone to stab Chun, laying collapsed and bleeding, where he sees An Lu’s face underwater, like a river nymph, smiling, yet remaining submerged in the water.  Surviving the attack, he makes his way into Tibet’s Chumar River, another 1300 miles to the northern headwater of the Yangtze, which flows from the disappearing Jianggendiru Glacier, the southwest side of Geladandong Peak in the Tanggula Mountains.  In this vast Tibetan Plateau, he finds an isolated gravestone of An Lu’s mother, guarded apparently by her religiously devout father who abandoned both of them to follow his own spiritual path, making this feel more like a religious pilgrimage, followed by early archival footage of the Yangtze River, including flimsy vessels attempting to navigate their way through a ferocious current before turning into a major thoroughway for shipping traffic.  In a final image, as religious statues can be seen overlooking the river, An Lu has taken her place among them.