Like the recent Australian drama "Jindabyne," "Still Life" examines what happens to the members of a community when the place they call home is deliberately flooded to make way for a new dam. In "Still Life," it is the city of Fengjie that now lies at the bottom of the Yangtze River, its population scattered and its submerged buildings, roads and parks nothing more than memories for those who once lived there (the Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2006). There are also plans to further raise the level of the river, resulting in the eventual loss of much of the surrounding area that still remains above water. As a result of the order to evacuate, what little is left of the city becomes ever more of a ghost town as the movie goes on.
Han Sanming returns to the area after 16 long years, unaware of what has happened to the town in his absence. He then goes in search of the ex-wife and teenaged daughter he hasn't seen in all that time, seeking news of their whereabouts from family members, acquaintances and total strangers he meets along the way. In an unrelated but concomitant plot line, Shen Hong is a woman who returns to the same area to find the husband who all but abandoned her two years earlier.
As directed by Zhang Ke Jia, "Still Life" is less a narrative-driven drama than a methodically-paced, contemplative look at people whose lives have been torn asunder by the "advancement" of modern technology but who have been so beaten down by an unfeeling bureaucracy that they have all but resigned themselves to a passive acceptance of their fate. Yet, all this is dealt with in an elliptical and oblique fashion as the two main characters focus primarily on the concerns of their own personal relationships and issues. But the true meaning of the film can be found in the penetrating and soul-crushing air of melancholy that hangs over the work.
Han Sanming returns to the area after 16 long years, unaware of what has happened to the town in his absence. He then goes in search of the ex-wife and teenaged daughter he hasn't seen in all that time, seeking news of their whereabouts from family members, acquaintances and total strangers he meets along the way. In an unrelated but concomitant plot line, Shen Hong is a woman who returns to the same area to find the husband who all but abandoned her two years earlier.
As directed by Zhang Ke Jia, "Still Life" is less a narrative-driven drama than a methodically-paced, contemplative look at people whose lives have been torn asunder by the "advancement" of modern technology but who have been so beaten down by an unfeeling bureaucracy that they have all but resigned themselves to a passive acceptance of their fate. Yet, all this is dealt with in an elliptical and oblique fashion as the two main characters focus primarily on the concerns of their own personal relationships and issues. But the true meaning of the film can be found in the penetrating and soul-crushing air of melancholy that hangs over the work.