Few filmmakers have
perhaps chronicled and critiqued the sweeping sociocultural transitions in their
countries, with such brutal honesty, as Jia Zhangke has over his career. The
enormous Three Gorges Dam’s construction on the Yangtze, despite its promised collective
benefits, led to the displacement of over a million people through submersion
of towns and villages. His powerful yet nuanced masterpiece Still Life provided for an
extraordinarily minimalist, profoundly affecting and deeply melancholic
exploration of the devastating human cost of development and progress. Set in a
small town on the banks of the river – a section of it is already lost into the
river, and preparations are underway for the next round of flooding – the film
chronicled lives of the displaced, the disaffected, the disenfranchised and the
marginalized through the tale of two individuals. Sanming (Han Sanming), a
coal-miner from Shanxi province who’s come down in search of his long-lost wife
and daughter, takes the job of demolishing buildings like the other migrant
workers, while hoping to be reunited with them; Shen (Zhao Tao), on the other
hand, has come down for a couple of days, also from Shanxi, hoping to seek
formal separation from her estranged husband. The understated style,
contributed by Jhangke’s rigorous visual aesthetic and the forlorn body
language of the two brilliant principal actors, laced the film with a haunting
sense of loneliness, pathos, lyricism and disquieting inevitability; Zhangke’s
bristling political angst, too, was palpable by his microcosmic representation
of China’s so-called “floating population”. The film’s breathtaking visual
canvas, achieved through masterful framing of shots and how the desolate
backdrops tell as much a story as the characters, added haunting dimensions to
its poignant beauty, depth and eloquence.
Director: Jia Zhangke
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Political Drama
Language: Mandarin
Country: China
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