I was watching Still Life (2006) in several sittings due to timing and being away on holiday. Not an ideal way to experience the film, and one I would have loved to have seen in a cinema, but its approach and tone suited the intermittent immersion. Dipping in and out of the movie like I was reading a novel. Kind of perfect in how the images flow. Camera panning across a scene, expansive backgrounds framed perfectly, always a sense of more to see.
Chinese director Jia Zhangke sets his film in a small town on the Yangtze River, which is undergoing destruction for the massive Three Gorges Dam project. The backdrop feels immense with the mountains, the buildings and urban spaces, and of course the long, winding river. There are two characters, two split narratives. Han Sanming, playing a character with the same name, is a miner arriving looking for his wife and daughter; he married his wife when he was young and hasn’t seen either her or his child in 15 years. Zhangke’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao plays Shen Hong, a nurse who arrives to talk to her husband who she hasn’t seen in 2 years. Han wants to reconnect with his family, while Shen wants to divorce her husband. In both cases, locating someone takes time and connections, particularly for Han who spends his days working as part of the crew knocking down buildings for the incoming flooding. There’s also a young guy he befriends, who is charming due to his idol worship of Chow Yun-Fat.
Zhangke’s film is slow and deliberate. Through the two characters whose storylines never intertwine, there’s a sense of how the personal feels minuscule in comparison to the flow of time and massive change, represented by the ongoing dam project. Old houses and homes underwater, streets no longer in existence, the people that Han meets eventually have to move. Interesting to watch this after Zhangke’s Ash Is The Purest White, the second act of which feels like a spiritual revisitation right down to having Zhao Tao (playing a different character) in the same location looking for her husband while holding onto a plastic water bottle (as she does here). In Still Life, there’s a close up of Zhao Tao that made me think about how there wasn’t a lot of close up until this point, and the impact the human face, hers in particular, has. Contemplative and searching, scattered with flashes of surreal imagery that intrudes upon the mist and the rain.
Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 