Two viewings have already convinced me that this is going to be one of my top films for 2007. As much as I liked it, I had some reservations about The World – the cellphone animation was a distraction, and the ending was too resolved for a Jia film. But Still Life is simply magnificent. It’s a new setting for Jia – a town in Sichuan about to be flooded in the Three Gorges Dam project – but he populates it with characters (and familiar actors) from his home province of Shanxi, and once again he focuses on the people that are losing out in China’s rushed economic modernisation: these are the “good people” (haoren) of the original Chinese title. Shot predominantly but not exclusively in slow (but never too/ slow) masterful long takes, this is a film of immense formal beauty and of profound feeling for its characters. I’m not sure about the couple of moments of magic realism (the UFO, the spaceship taking off!) but the final shot with the tightrope walker in the far distance ends the film splendidly.
This Mainland Chinese DVD (with English subtitles) also has an unsubtitled disc of the documentary Dong that Jia made at the same time. This I like a lot less – one of the problems for me is that the subject, Liu Xiaodong, is a painter whose realist style is banal and regressive. In addition, the second half shot in Bangkok lacks the authenticity of the Fengjie setting. But one interesting aspect to the documentary is that it includes shots from Still Life, some of which – those in which Han Sanming appears – are clearly “acted”.
by Ian Johnston | Source: WB DVD
21 Jan 2007 11:18 AM | Submit Comment
