Director: Jia Zhang-Ke
Year Released: 2006
Rating: 2.5
A man returns, after 16 years, to an area of China along the Yangtze that's being dismantled and its inhabitants displaced (the Three Gorges Dam project) in order to find his wife and daughter; meanwhile, a nurse is also in the same area, looking for her husband (so she can divorce him after they've been apart for two years). Jia's films aren't as much about plotting and character as they're about scenery, the 'flow' of life (eating, drinking, smoking) and politics: this is really a lament for the constantly shifting and modernizing 'new' China, which is moving forward without worrying about the effects on the people or the environment. As a 'lament' for the worker (the pay is terrible, the risks are high) and for China's poorer citizens I can see where he's coming from, but the distance he keeps more or less negates any emotion, and the HD video causes the backgrounds to look flared out. On the other hand, his documentary about modern artist Liu Xiaodong, Dong - a sort-of companion film to Still Life that also features the Three Gorges area - takes full advantage of the intimacy of HD video. Jia proves to be a curious documentarian, sitting back and letting his subject smoke, sleep and talk a little about his creative process - he's not afraid to let his camera drift, to show the occasional odd moment (like when Liu visits a family that just lost its patriarch for unknown reasons) or include footage of a minor car accident. It's unorthodox, but I found it compelling. [Still Life: 2.5, Dong: 3.0]
