Still Life (PG)

Drama (2006)
112mins Chi

Starring: Zhao Tao, Wang Hongwei, Han Sanming
Director: Jia Zhangke
Writer(s): Jia Zhangke
Listings: London | Rest of UK and Ireland

A coal miner is haunted by the disappearance of his wife, who vanished without trace 16 years ago. His search for answers leads him to the town of Fengjie, which will itself disappear in the flooding of the Three Gorges Dam project. There, the miner meets a nurse, who hasn't had any contact with her husband for two years. The two strangers seek peace of mind as the beautiful landscape changes beyond all recognition.

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LondonNet Film Review
Still Life

Still Life, which comes to the UK over a year removed from winning the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, is the least entertaining movie I have ever seen. It also may be the most beautiful...

In it, two people who never meet have come to Fengjie, in the ominous proximity of the world's biggest dam, to search for lost love ones. Shen Han is searching for her husband and Sanming for his wife; the movie goes back and forth between their separate pursuits.

Fengjie is doomed by the dam, which is turning the Yangtze River into a sea, filling up the gorge and submerging neighbourhoods as it does. Over a million people have been displaced by it already, and the writing is literally on the wall (we see periodically in the movie lines marking the next water level increase) for many hundreds of thousands more.

We wallow in inevitability and injustice, depravity and futile heroism, as Zhangke and director of photography Yu Likwai cast an unyielding eye on the natural beauty and the rotting creations of man until we are as saturated as the base of the gorge. And then they make us look at it some more, until somehow the squalor starts to look as gorgeous and poignant as the forest.

Shen Han is wearing the same yellow shirt she had on when she arrived on the banks of the swollen river. Her husband stands a few feet away, but the ravine between them is by now much wider than the lush gorge in which the city sits. It's been two years since she's seen him last. They speak in abrupt, wrenching sentences, leaving most of the meaning in silences that seem to stretch forever. Whatever they had once is dead now.

Behind them is the dam. It looms, and the undercurrent of human tragedy hurts so much more in understatement than it ever could were it shouted in special effects and over-acting.

In the film's final scene, Sanming looks back at the city he's leaving. Ahead of him is a year to pay back an enormous debt, his wife's brother's, which he has inherited in order to purchase her freedom. There is a silhouette of a man, walking from one damned building to another on a tightrope. There is no explanation for this act, with its negligible tangible reward (reaching the roof of the second building) juxtaposed against the very likely possibility of disaster. But there he is and his risk is moving. Such is life.

- Kiernan Maletsky

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