Four hours is too long for me to watch a film all at once, so I went two alternate days to watch the first and second halves of the film, and neither of the two days I came out fully convinced of what I had seen. I enjoyed the style, the introversion mood that permeates all the scenes, depicted in close shots of the characters' heads with a usually blurry background; it seems the intention is that you perceive the world through the minds of the characters, yet this is a failed attempt often since the situational context does not manage to tell you much about what's inside the characters' minds. Conversations do not manage to solve this problem and to provide some more information on each character's perspectives, they are scarce and tend to be superficial, adding little for the comprehension of their attitudes to life (bleak without exception). This is one of the main problems of this film, the poor dialogues, although maybe a good deal is lost in the translation and they are more meaningful in Chinese.
Basically the film brings together a group of interrelated personages which experience (and sometimes cause) in the course of a single day all the imaginable sufferings a human being can pass through: loneliness, family tensions and conflicts, indiference from others and your own relatives, public exposure of awkward secrets, accidental killing, death of a relative, suicide, adultery, lies, scams, violence in different degrees, including shooting... Obviously there is no realistic intention in the development of the plot, instead all these misfortunes are piled up together to explicitly show how awful life is, something that is also bluntly expressed by some of the characters during the film... I would have expected this was transmited with some more subtetly.
Unfortunately we will not be able to see more films from this director, sadly he decided to follow the fate of one of the characters (at least) in the film. He seems to have fully exposed his view of life in this film, and then act accordingly. May he find now the harmony of mind he apparently could not get during his short life, and rest in peace.
Basically the film brings together a group of interrelated personages which experience (and sometimes cause) in the course of a single day all the imaginable sufferings a human being can pass through: loneliness, family tensions and conflicts, indiference from others and your own relatives, public exposure of awkward secrets, accidental killing, death of a relative, suicide, adultery, lies, scams, violence in different degrees, including shooting... Obviously there is no realistic intention in the development of the plot, instead all these misfortunes are piled up together to explicitly show how awful life is, something that is also bluntly expressed by some of the characters during the film... I would have expected this was transmited with some more subtetly.
Unfortunately we will not be able to see more films from this director, sadly he decided to follow the fate of one of the characters (at least) in the film. He seems to have fully exposed his view of life in this film, and then act accordingly. May he find now the harmony of mind he apparently could not get during his short life, and rest in peace.