It's Good Friday*
Mar. 22nd, 2008 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThere's a particular pleasure in going to see a film about which you know nothing; and I experienced it yesterday. We went, at Sue's instigation, to see Sanxia haoren (shown here under the title Still Life, which Sue told us was a Chinese film about people whose village was being flooded for a reservoir. Not exactly - this is not a pastoral, elegiac movie.
For a start, this is not a village, it's a sizable town, and it's not "a reservoir" it's the Three Gorges Project, the largest hydro-electric project in the world. The setting is not so much pastoral as post-apocalyptic - the characters move through a city already part flooded, part demolished, nesting in the concrete tower blocks, picking their way through the rubble, making a living as best they can. Buildings are marked with painted characters indicating which is next for demolition, or where the lake will rise to when the next phase of work is complete.
This is surreal in the way that contemporary China must be surreal, the power of modern economic forces driving through ancient countryside, ruthless and technically accomplished. The camera follows Han Sanming as he arrives by boat at the flooded city of Fengjie - and phones home to tell his mother he has arrived; mobile phones abound, and characters compare the songs they have chosen for their ringtones. Han Sanming's quest for his wife is counterpointed by the arrival of Shen Hong, looking for her husband, and these two strands entwine, although the characters never meet, to paint a still life of modern China.
Or does the title refer to the commodities - cigarettes, liquor, tea and toffee - which feature at different points of the story, and are labeled in Chinese characters on the screen? Is this a convention, or an idiosyncracy of the filmmaker, or something else?
Certainly there is an additional surreal element in the film, one which is not inherent in the situation but overlaid onto it, like the moment when a concrete structure (it looks sculptural, much like Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion upended, but may just have been the skeleton of a partly dismantled building) blasts off from the hillside - Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, thought this was "an aesthetic error", but it made me gasp with pleasure and surprise. I didn't know what to make, though, of the group of characters briefly shown in richly elaborate costumes, like something from a classic Chinese opera, playing on hand-held games consoles.
So, and gentle, sad, interesting movie, and afterwards - since it was Good Friday, after all, we joined the queue for fish and chips at the Starbeck chippy; and marvelled at the speed and good humour with which fish were fried and orders assembled, while hail rattled outside the windows.
*Yes, yes, we know: "It's good any day!"
For a start, this is not a village, it's a sizable town, and it's not "a reservoir" it's the Three Gorges Project, the largest hydro-electric project in the world. The setting is not so much pastoral as post-apocalyptic - the characters move through a city already part flooded, part demolished, nesting in the concrete tower blocks, picking their way through the rubble, making a living as best they can. Buildings are marked with painted characters indicating which is next for demolition, or where the lake will rise to when the next phase of work is complete.
This is surreal in the way that contemporary China must be surreal, the power of modern economic forces driving through ancient countryside, ruthless and technically accomplished. The camera follows Han Sanming as he arrives by boat at the flooded city of Fengjie - and phones home to tell his mother he has arrived; mobile phones abound, and characters compare the songs they have chosen for their ringtones. Han Sanming's quest for his wife is counterpointed by the arrival of Shen Hong, looking for her husband, and these two strands entwine, although the characters never meet, to paint a still life of modern China.
Or does the title refer to the commodities - cigarettes, liquor, tea and toffee - which feature at different points of the story, and are labeled in Chinese characters on the screen? Is this a convention, or an idiosyncracy of the filmmaker, or something else?
Certainly there is an additional surreal element in the film, one which is not inherent in the situation but overlaid onto it, like the moment when a concrete structure (it looks sculptural, much like Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion upended, but may just have been the skeleton of a partly dismantled building) blasts off from the hillside - Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, thought this was "an aesthetic error", but it made me gasp with pleasure and surprise. I didn't know what to make, though, of the group of characters briefly shown in richly elaborate costumes, like something from a classic Chinese opera, playing on hand-held games consoles.
So, and gentle, sad, interesting movie, and afterwards - since it was Good Friday, after all, we joined the queue for fish and chips at the Starbeck chippy; and marvelled at the speed and good humour with which fish were fried and orders assembled, while hail rattled outside the windows.
*Yes, yes, we know: "It's good any day!"
