Still life (2006)

I am trying to get rid of my prejudice about Chinese movies as big-budget boosting about ancient emperors. Still life (dir. Jia Zhangke) has nothing to do with this genre: no action-fuelled fighting, no pompous praising of China, no glossy images. The story of the film is a simple one. A man and a woman are looking for their spouses in the area where the three gorges dam is built. We get as much involved in the personal stories of the two main characters as the landscape in which they move about: demolition, demolition, flooding. Millions of people have been evicted from their homes. This is a world of almost post-apocalyptic measures, just throw in one or two sites of capitalist luxury in the midst of destruction. The film doesn't preach, it shows. Some have pointed out the links to Italian neorealism and Antonioni - which makes complete sense. This is a realistic film in a world which has stopped making sense. One of the characters takes a job while he looks for his wife. The other character meets her business man husband only to tell him that she has fallen in love with another. Their stories are told through understated scenes and silences, rather than big gestures and confrontations. Well, there are a few moments of confrontations in the movie, but not of the kind you expect. In one scene, we see a group of workers attacking their boss for irresponsible behavior - scenes like this, were political material seep into the story about family member, keep the film alive. This separates Still life from almost every other family drama. The film does not approach the family as a closed unit, a little world in itself. Here, our characters are all the time a part of an evolving, open-ended world. Jia Zhangke pays attention to details and not only the big patterns. He makes drama out of mobile phone ring tone, the facial expressions of ferry passengers or a sweaty performance in front of happy workers. Odd elements - UFO:s! - swoosh by in some scenes, and to me, these elements made it all to clear that this is realism but not realism - what the hell is realism in a world like this one?

One of the things that impressed me about this movie was its attention to place. The demolition areas and the grandeour of new projects were put on a par with the space of the home. The way the director keeps alive these both dimension made the rootlessness of the main characters all the more terrible to watch. - Even though the cinematography is elegant and beautiful, I never got the impression that the film aesthetisizes the wasteland shown in these images. 

If you have the opportunity to get a hold of this movie - watch it!