Still Life

Director: JIA ZHANG-KE

Review By Max Burke

Still Life is the latest film from Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke, and was the recipient of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2006. Why it has taken so long for the film to reach American shores in anyone's guest, but the movie is a real delight for fans of international cinema, a formally adventurous masterwork as emotionally wrenching as it is relevant global economic and humanitarian concerns.

The film is centered around the town of Fengjie, an entire city which will be consumed with water when the controversial Three Gorges Dam Project is completed. It follows a miner who returns home to find his wife and child after years of estrangement, and a a bourgeois woman whose personal life is falling apart. Using these two characters as ciphers to explore the effect of China's lightning-fast transformation into a modern, industrialized country Zhang-Ke takes his time with long takes and wide shots, as well as a casual editing style that allows moments and scenes to linger well past their natural dramatic conclusion.

Still Life offers little hope of resolution to its two protagonists, instead examining their lives in a pseudo-documentary style that gives the film a sheen of extreme realism, while maintaining an aesthetic sensibility in line with the great works of international art cinema. Zhang-Ke transforms ambient moments, such as an adolescent quoting Chow Yun Fat and then lighting up a smoke while a city crumbles behind him, into major statements about the effects of modernization and the inevitable social, political, and economic fractures that result.

Still Life is an unavoidably relevant and hypnotizing film experience. If his international credibility wasn't already extremely high, Still Life would certainly solidify his position as perhaps the most important Chinese filmmaker of his generation. Media attention will only become more and more focused on China in the coming years, and how lucky is the film-going community to have a director like Jia Zhang-Ke to add a deep humanism, as well as a master filmmaker's confident, effortless direction to our modern impressions of this most relevant country.