Customer Reviews

Still Life

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Of all the great films coming out of China these days, none are more representative of "the real China" than the movies of Jia Zhang Ke. Combining a semi-documentary approach with an occasional touch of surrealism, his hi-def digital video renditions of the lives of ordinary Chinese adapting to the most vertiginous change in the history of the world are eye-popping and achingly beautiful. A must for anyone who cares about the cutting-edge of cinema.

"Still Life" was written and directed by Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke, who brings a documentarian's style to this fictional drama inspired by the upheaval that the incredible Three Gorges Dam project has created. Two people from the city of Shanxi travel south to what is left of Fengjie to look for people from their past. Han Sanming (Han Sanming) is trying to find his ex-wife who took their young daughter and left him 16 years ago. Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) hasn't heard from her husband in 2 years and journeys to Fengjie, where he is a manager for the Demolition Authority, to confront him. Fengjie is a 2000-year-old town in the process of being demolished in 2 years, as it is gradually flooded, with much of the Old City already submerged.

"Still Life" is shot and scripted in a "cinema verite" style with a conspicuously slow, contemplative pace. It doesn't ever speed up, but it did eventually lull me into its languid universe. It is a mediation on people's relationship to the past and to life's forward motion. Sanming and Hong have come to Fengjie to either reclaim their past or to let it go. There is an archeological dig across the river, ironically digging up relics from thousands of years ago, as the town of Fengjie is demolished and buried, while the great Three Gorges Dam is constructed. Director Jia Zhang-Ke has delicately highlighted the strange cultural and social implications of China's massive infrastructure project, where past, present, and future meet head-on. It is clear which is winning, but which should win is less certain. In Mandarin with optional English subtitles.

The DVD (New Yorker Films 2008): The documentary "Dong" (1 hour, 10 min) is included on the disc. This is a loosely structured film about the artist Liu Xiaodong which first introduced Jia Zhang-Ke to the Three Gorges region. There is an "Interview with Jia Zhang-Ke" (18 min) in which he speaks about the film's structure, themes, his documentary approach, visual style, and the Sixth Generation emphasis on the personal and individual. There is also a theatrical trailer (2 min) and a Press Kit and interview with the director in DVD-ROM form, which can be accessed on a Windows or Mac computer. The film and bonus features are in Mandarin with optional English subtitles. The white subtitles can be a little difficult to read at times and would have been better in yellow.

For American Audiences who don't like the unfamiliar feeling of a different language and location can feel at home with the political decisions that damned the homes, neighborhoods, and residents in the film who out of desperation work in unsafe working conditions. Director Zhang Ke Jia does however leave viewers with a positive feeling of the human bonds the workers find with each other on the battle field of life.

STILL LIFE challenges some basic assumptions not just about how life is lived in the wastelands of urbanized China but also about how film directors can record this pace. Director Jia Zhang Ke responds by taking a tack that is alien to the minds of American audiences that are accustomed to the standard beginning, middle, and end of Hollywood plots liberally sprinkled by action, sex, or romance. Here Ke strives to replicate the rhythms of life as they are experienced by those who are actually there. The actors are all amateurs, but their collective talents lie not in individual scenes of great power but in a montage of scenes of incremental strength. There is the natural tendency for western audiences to be turned off by what seems a superficially glacially slow pace of plot. Things seem to take forever to happen and when they do, no big deal is made. The actors simply go on to the next scene, but what is really going on is that change is happening even if that change is internal. The viewer must look at facial expression and body language to determine that. It is precisely here that western audiences have difficulty. This is a cultural attribute but for those who endure past the midpoint, the results are worth it. What is the plot? A coal miner travels to Fengzhie to reclaim a wife and daughter taken from him by the police sixteen years earlier. In a parallel story, a nurse travels to the same city to reclaim a husband who abandoned her two years before. One succeeds and one fails. Other critics have noted an allegorical subtext of the search for a previous civilization even as the current one is being literally dismantled brick by brick. Now this interpretation is pretty heavy fare for a movie that seems to slow down one's mental processes to match the tempo of the cast while at the same time to speed things up by requiring you to think outside the allegorical box. STILL LIFE is a well chosen title. Whether it refers to a pace that reflects the static inertia of a painting or the buzzing of life that occurs just beneath the surface is a function of what the viewer brings to the cinematic table.

Whoever said "You can't go home again," must have had something like "Still Life" in mind.

Like the recent Australian drama "Jindabyne," "Still Life" examines what happens to the members of a community when the place they call home is deliberately flooded to make way for a new dam. In "Still Life," it is the city of Fengjie that now lies at the bottom of the Yangtze River, its population scattered and its submerged buildings, roads and parks nothing more than memories for those who once lived there (the Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2006). There are also plans to further raise the level of the river, resulting in the eventual loss of much of the surrounding area that still remains above water. As a result of the order to evacuate, what little is left of the city becomes ever more of a ghost town as the movie goes on.

Han Sanming returns to the area after 16 long years, unaware of what has happened to the town in his absence. He then goes in search of the ex-wife and teenaged daughter he hasn`t seen in all that time, seeking news of their whereabouts from family members, acquaintances and total strangers he meets along the way. In an unrelated but concomitant plotline, Shen Hong is a woman who returns to the same area to find the husband who all but abandoned her two years earlier.

As directed by Zhang Ke Jia, "Still Life" is less a narrative-driven drama than a methodically-paced, contemplative look at people whose lives have been torn asunder by the "advancement" of modern technology but who have been so beaten down by an unfeeling bureaucracy that they have all but resigned themselves to a passive acceptance of their fate. Yet, all this is dealt with in an elliptical and oblique fashion as the two main characters focus primarily on the concerns of their own personal relationships and issues. But the true meaning of the film can be found in the penetrating and soul-crushing air of melancholy that hangs over the work.

Agree with the other 5-star reviewers. This movie will help you understand modern China and the consequences of its rapid development, as told through the lens of true "auteur" Zhang Jiake. Sensitive in its portrayal, very slow in its delivery, this is a movie to watch in the dark with thoughtful people. This is not casual viewing for a rambunctious crowd indifferent towards China or film as art.

If you like film as art and exploring cultural and societal issues, you will love this. If you are looking for casual viewing à la "Weekend at Bernie's," you will be bitterly disappointed.

At times mesmerizing, one of the best films I've seen in the past couple of years. I am totally taken by Zhang-ke's non-linear narratives. And to top the cake with those three or four moments when you rub your eyes in disbelief -fabulous eye candy indeed.

Zhang Ke Jia's "Still Life" opens with a mild-mannered, middle-aged coal miner Han Sanming (Han Sanming) arriving at Fengjie, the city upstream of the Three Gorges Dam, China's massive hydropower project on the Yangtze River. Han Sanming is looking for his wife and daughter he hasn't seen for sixteen years.

The film's second story begins with a nurse Shen Hong, looking for her husband who had left home two years ago. But the real protagonists of "Still Life" are the beautiful nature of the county and the city of Fengjie that is now being demolished, and the people living there. The film is not so much about the two travelers, from whose viewpoints we see the town of Fengjie, as about the residents of the slowly dying town.

The beautifully-shot film sometimes looks like a picture - a picture that moves quietly. The camera often pans slowly as if recording the landscapes that are vanishing. The film, in an understated way, suggests that the dam construction has affected the lives of people living in the town that will soon disappear. "Still Life" is most touching when it shows a glimpse of their lives and uncertain future.

Director Zhang Ke Jia adds some surreal touch to the quiet film in unexpected ways - like a man on a tightrope, or a huge monument suddenly flying up like a rocket. These playful images are visually captivating, metaphors capturing the unreal atmosphere of the town, while some viewers find them slightly out of place.

"Still Life" requires patience on the viewer's part, but the end result is rewarding especially for those who are interested in what is going on in contemporary China and the people living there.

This winner movie was awarded as Best film in 2006 at Venice Festival. A captivating and minimalist artistic project which carves in relief, admirable landscapes in which the village of Fengie and the beautiful Yangtze remarks what we could label as a cruiser movie. Two lonely people decide to undertake a search. The first one of them is the miner Sanming tries to know what about his ex-wife, whom he has not been aware sixteen years ago. On the other hand, the nurse Shen Hong travels to Fengije to find his husband who left his home two years ago.

The sequences of demolition of the city underline the aspect of an irreversible transformation and perpetual change, which accents the existential loneliness, not only the main protagonist but the common people.

A peaceful but still expressive film that must be watched.

Jia Zhang-ke's melancholic film "Still Life" is about the search for a personal past amidst the destruction of the present. A man and a woman travel separately to the Three Gorges part of China looking for their lost spouses. But the towns along the Yantze River are being torn down and obliterated by the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric project. Paradoxically, archeologists still search for ancient artifacts as their surroundings are being systematically destroyed. The loneliness and despair that the people in the film display reflects a society where the speed of industrialization, corruption and political powerlessness create a feeling of hopelessness and inertia; perhaps that's the meaning of the film's title, although to survive economically, workers must always be on the move. Zhang-ke has a quasi-documentary film style that captures the mundane aspects of the everyday life of his primarily working-class characters. He introduces a few fantasy elements without comment--a UFO blazes through the sky and the shell of an apartment building becomes a rocket ship. Perhaps only the supernatural can come to the rescue of these disenfranchised people.