Visionary Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke casts his eye again on the landscape of China’s accelerated economy, rapid social change, and erosion of old to make way for new. TIM WONG is in awe of the director’s latest, Still Life, set amongst the developing Three Gorges Dam.


CHINA’s colossal Three Gorges Dam is the extraterrestrial setting for Jia Zhang-ke’s latest foray into the socio-economic surreal; a perverse dreamscape of industrial wasteland, scenic splendor, and frightening architectural feats. Despite having to contend with a perpetual polluted haze, Jia’s fifth feature is another work of astonishing clarity on the effects of a nation’s insatiable appetite for growth.

Negotiating the still waters of the rising Yangtze River are two lost souls: Han Sanming (playing himself), a mainlander seeking his ex-wife who may or may not have been relocated from her to-be-submerged village; and Shen Hong (Jia muse Zhao Tao), a city dweller determined to confront her absentee husband, now working under auspices of the ceaseless Dam project. As the parallel search parties meander across a topography resembling a war zone, Martian panorama, and futuristic colony all at once, the classic Jia Zhang-ke landmarks are mapped out with acute familiarity: the polarity of old and new, the scars of unremitting change, and the human debris of those left in its wake.

Attempting to ride its wave are Chinese who share a craving for globalisation: the men wear nothing but y-fronts, yet all carry cellphones; traces of Kylie Minouge and Chow Yun Fat reverberate (ironically, seen in A Better Tomorrow); even inanimate objects are not immune, and as if succumbing to modernisation, break free from their environment and ‘take off’. Still Life’s companion piece, Dong (also screening at this festival), converges on these same bizarre instances of cultural shock, and is ultimately less about artist Liu Ziao-dong than it is about the milieu he paints to canvas: firstly, more semi-naked men in the foreground of a disintegrating concrete-wilderness malaise; secondly, Thai models (or should that be prostitutes?) in confined, but equally artificial surroundings. The documentary reprises passages from Lim Giong’s hypnotic scoring of The World, but is otherwise indistinguishable from Still Life, save for several singular moments captured on Yu Likwai’s all-seeing high definition video: a tight rope walker, a stunningly framed building demolition.

All of this adds up to a certain lunacy that Jia’s previous film location, Beijing’s World Park, managed to invoke through inescapable juxtapositions. Three Gorges Dam, an engineering behemoth scheduled to displace over one million citizens, imposes itself unavoidably, but also feels less of a stagey conceit. Jia’s one concession is to turn his camera on the lighting of a spectacular, newly erected suspension bridge down river, emerging suddenly from the dusk, yet leading seemingly to nowhere – an empire symbol of China’s impetuous, new capitalist economy.

Elsewhere though, the signs point to a filmmaker beginning a transition: gone are the youth-crisises; no longer is the outlook for his characters quite as bleak. Jia’s approach meanwhile is more impersonal and pensive, but clearly still one-of-a-kind. Six years on from the extraordinary Platform, Still Life retains a cogency in national commentary, remains eye opening and occasionally amusing in its social illustrations, and continues to show compassion for those caught in the maelstrom – all the while forging onwards as a potential departure point in its director’s oeuvre . Whatever lies ahead for Jia, the rapid and correlative effects of China’s advance will ensure he has the material to keep moving forward.