May 09, 2008
SFIFF Note #4.
Jia Zhangke's brilliant new film is no ghost story, but it's nevertheless filled with figures of the walking dead. It's titled Still Life, perhaps an apt title for a movie filled with movement and travel, but towards an imminent entropy.
The setting is Fengjie, the province with the most people affected by China's Three Gorges Dam project. The movie follows Sanming, who has come to town to look for his wife and daughter, who he has not seen in 16 years. An unscrupulous motorcycle rider takes him for a ride to see them at their last-known address, and he discovers that this is now under water, flooded by the dammed river. "Haven't you heard of the Three Gorges Dam?" the driver asks him, incredulously. Sanming barely responds.
It's tempting to dismiss him as merely being some slightly dimwitted yokel, but his slow, deadpan reactions are more likely integral to his acting, as it sets the tone for the film. Sanming shuffles numbly in and out of the frame, mostly disengaged from the swirl around him, as if he (and indeed, the others around him) are perpetually in a state of shock.
It is an apt reaction to what will apparently be four million people displaced (some, if not many, forcibly) from their homes. There is no better visual metaphor for the impending devastation than the gutted insides of apartment buildings, held together only by their near-crumbling frames of concrete, or workers with sledgehammers slowly rendering bricks into dust. The words of apocalypse – "186 m. water level" – painted on the walls, or “OK for demolition” on houses, are constant reminders of the coming flood.
Jia, at least in the three films of his that I've seen so far, is clearly fascinated by the contradictions of modernity as seen in present-day China, and of people swept up in national and global currents well beyond their control. But I place "contradictions" in quotation marks because it's not always clear that they are seen by his characters as such. (There's a bit of a running joke in this vein, where Zhao Tao's character is drinking water in practically every scene.)
In this film, and in The World, for instance, there's a lot of business with cell phones as a medium for communication. But it doesn't change the fact that families are constantly separated and estranged due to the demands of capital. The cell phones, as symbols of progress, can barely assuage the psychological and emotional wounds of labor migration. No technological marvel -- Mao's dream, which entranced him so much that he wrote a poem about it -- could make up for the human and environmental ruin, and Jia's movie intelligently records this sense of 21st-century dislocation.
(Saw the movie with Ben, Jun-dai and Lucia.)
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It hardly seems fair to compare Yung Chang's excellent debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, with work by a master filmmaker like Jia, but the comparison is inevitable: Chang's movie is set further downstream, in Fengdu province. His documentary focuses on the tourist trade, as it follows a girl who works in the kitchen of a cruise boat on the Yangtze ferrying Western tourists -- the apparently willing believers of official government discourse. Yu Shui, renamed Cindy for easier pronunciation, also happens to come from a dirt-poor family of peasant farmers whose riverbank shack is about to be inundated.
Chang has such a remarkable sense of drama and rhythm, for the elegant ebb and flow of the parade of ordinary images before the camera -- so much so that it feels less and less a documentary than a narrative feature. It may not have the desolate poetry of Jia's images, but Up the Yangtze proves there is nothing more gripping or painful than the reality of desolation itself.