Posted April 26, 2007
Still Life
Starring: Tao Zhao, Sanming Han
Director: Jia Ke Zhiang

Still Life

The latest picture from the remarkably talented Chinese director Jia Ke Zhiang (Platform, The World) took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last fall, beguiled the critics who then saw it at a special screening at Cannes, and... bypassed the New York Film Festival, which may have seemed a natural habitat for it, altogether.

NYFF's loss is Tribeca's gain, as this 2006 picture is thoroughly beguiling and discreetly moving. It's set in a village that's about to be submerged in the construction of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, and tells two parallel stories, each a search for lost love. Zhiang vet Tao Zhao plays a woman looking for her husband, who's been working on a dam-related project for two years, while Sanming Han plays an itinerant laborer searching for the wife, and daughter, he was estranged from 16 years before. Given the peculiar visual splendor of the real-life locations of construction and excavation through which these characters wander (in ways that evoke both Rossellini and Antonioni), one might observe that anybody could make an intriguing movie in them. But Zhiang is hardly anybody, and the emotion and creativity he brings to bear on showing us sights and sites — not to mention the droll, enigmatic sci-fi touches he drops into the narrative so nonchalantly — make Still Life a breathtaking cinematic experience. It's too bad the picture's companion piece, a documentary in the same setting titled Dong, isn't here along with it.

— Glenn Kenny