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Still Life Movie Review

By Prairie Miller

The setting of Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia's solemn, gracefully somber Still Life (Sanxia Haoren) is the Three Gorges Dam Project, which is expected to bring geographical stability to an area marred by the deaths of tens of thousands over the past century, from catastrophic floods. But with progress also comes change, and the incidental destruction of numerous lives in multiple ways.

The story focuses on the town of Fengjie, which is being demolished to make way for the completion of the dam, and will soon vanish underwater. As homes and buildings are being torn down, their rubble stretches out across the fractured landscape like the ravages of a terrible, nearly silent war. And the remaining residents wander about in the sweltering heat as internal refugees, dazed and sullen, seemingly lost in time and space.

Into this stagnated wreckage, this collective yet estranged still life posing un-selfconsciously as if for a mass funeral are two protagonists, each in search of a lost and found lover. Sanming (Han Sanming) is a miner from the countryside, looking for the wife he bought and their daughter she took off with, many years ago. And Shen (Zhao Tao) is a nurse who has come in search of her husband who left her long ago, in order to seek a divorce and marry another man. She's tried calling him numerous times over the years, but discovers when she arrives that the calls never went though because phone numbers have since increased to seven digits to dial, instead of six.

Though each one finds the person they've been seeking, there's little relief or sense of closure. An aura of hopelessness about the present and future has enveloped the town, settling over everyone. And it's not just the dam, but a sense that life itself has been disfigured, stunted and traumatized, as it's caught between the fragmented past and uncertain future with the loss of the traditional sense of community and the inception of the market economy, wand its rapid surge that seems to have left the population at the bottom of the food chain simply dazed, perplexed and uprooted.

Still Life is alluring to behold, with its steady stream of stark imagery, downcast mood, and the occasional spark of life that intimates slim hope, as when the scrawny, exhausted demolition workers huddle together in cramped quarters to partake of the small but eagerly anticipated luxury of a shared, simple meal. And it's a unique and luminous story where far more is revealed through what is felt and measured in the procession of glimpses into life's most meaningful moments, rather than the typical pace of a conventionally evolving narrative whose resolutions rarely mirror in as genuine a manner, accumulated reality.

New Yorker Films
Unrated
3 stars