Review Movies Archive

You need to watch this movie (“Still Life” by Jia Zhangke) which just showed up on Canadian Netflix (Canadian Netflix sucks, and it’s probably been on American Netflix for like eight years already so no excuses). Here’s a trailer:

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Zhangke animates a world so much more kinetically charged and huge and dominating than can be any more than wondered at by its characters that it leaves you with the feeling that Tommy Lee Jones’ character in No Country For Old Men (Sheriff Bell) was trying to articulate in his monologues (example), but at a more advanced and acute stage — achieving a visceral sense of what it might be like to be one of the “Tiller Girls” Sigfried Kracauer describes in his “Mass Ornament” (pdf) essay:

The ornament, detached from its bearers, must be understood rationally. It consists of degrees and circles like those found in textbooks of euclidean geometry. Waves and spirals, the elementary structures of physics, are also included; discarded are the proliferations of organic forms and the radiations of spiritual life. Hereafter, the Tiller Girls can no longer be reassembled as human beings. Their mass gymnastics are never performed by whole, autonomous boies whose contortions would deny rational understanding. Arms, thighs and other segments are the smallest components of the composition.

Re: the bolded in the quote — they may not be able to be reassembled as human beings, but that doesn’t mean they don’t long to be. In Still Life, characters have spent a life submitting to the personally meaningless prerogative to whatever abstracted kind of raw and mindless labour in whatever random-seeming place is dictated by the gargantuan machine of the Chinese political economy, almost but not quite reconciled to total alienation.

A million things seem to be happening in every frame and in every moment of the audio, and rarely are these things in any way related to the lives of the characters beyond just occurring in their presence.

There’s still beauty and whimsy — tiny but vivid strokes of red and yellow scarring the bleakness of washed out shots of smoggy faded city-scapes, a weird and huge cement structure taking off into the sky unnoticed in the background. But the personal significance or larger meaning of this beauty/whimsy is no more apparent than that of the impelled distances (in space and time) dividing the characters from the people they’ve finally decided to drop their settled labour to seek. They seem so significant, but in a million different possible ways, none of which can ever be more than silently speculated about.

You feel a realism pushed so far it’s turned a brutal kind of incredibly true absurd. The sense it gives is one of being touched by an artist that grasps the truth of a world-historic existential situation unprecedented in its convolution. Maybe one of sober awe at the realization of how rare and precious an experience you’re having.

Zhangke nails this sense again and again (at least in 24 City — also on Netflix — and Platform, which are the two other of his films I’ve seen). You should watch those too.