Review: Jia Zhang-ke's "Still Life"

The title of Jia Zhang-ke's latest feature would seem at first to be grimly ironic, since the Three Gorges Dam, around which the film's bifurcated narrative revolves, has caused the lives of everyone around it to be anything but still. At the same time, Jia's moody, contemplative camerawork forces us to pay attention to the impact of China's rapid progress, especially in the year of the Beijing Olympics, which is shaping up as China's symbolic coming-out party as an economic and cultural world power to be reckoned with. The vagaries of U.S. film distribution are such that no less than three significant Chinese films from 2006 and 2007, each provocative in its own unique way, will be released this month. The first is Still Life, one of the strongest works to date by one of China's, and indeed the world's, finest filmmakers. (The others are Li Yu's Lost in Beijing and Lou Ye's Summer Palace, both of which angered Chinese authorities, earning its respective filmmakers, and mutual producer, an official ban from the Chinese film industry).

In Still Life, Jia's loose structure unfolds with the uncommon grace and unforced lyricism which is his forte. Almost everything we see is in an advanced state of decay and disrepair, yet possesses its own unsettling beauty. This brings to mind two recent documentaries set in China, both vivid evocations of this country's twenty-first century industrial age: Jennifer Bachiwal's Manufactured Landscapes, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky, and Jia's own documentary Dong, the reality companion piece to the (mostly) fictional Still Life. As Jia told me in an interview I conducted with him last year, "I see movies as a tool to record memory." Memory of what is rapidly being lost is one of the many eloquent themes of Jia's film, and the loss of the past is what links the two non-converging stories he tells in Still Life.