Still Life

If you’ve got a thing for Antonioni, you’ll probably fall for Jia Zhang-ke. He expresses feeling -- predominantly of dislocation -- through environment rather than through story or character. The World took place in a Vegas-like Beijing amusement park with reduced-scale models of the world’s great attractions from the Eiffel Tower to the Taj Mahal. Still Life transpires in an old city about to be inundated by the Three Gorges Dam in southern China, largest in the world. Two parallel but unconnected stories detail the quest of a spouse from the North who is searching for the mate that disappeared into this disappearing town. We mutely and slowly follow the searches of the man and woman through a doomed environment of buildings being vacated and demolished by gangs of workmen wielding sledgehammers. Beautifully filmed in HD video, with reference to traditions of Chinese painting and incursions of digital surrealism, this film engages one’s documentary interest in news from the other side of the world, if you have the patience for evocative enigmas without much emotion or event. The amazing landscape of the place and the scope of human displacement overshadow individual involvement with the fate of the characters. Jia is the hottest young Chinese director on the international scene, as evidenced by this film coming in 7th in the IndieWire poll for 2008. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-81.)