Chinese Cinema: Still Life by Jia Zhang-Ke (2006)

This is a very beautiful film and a very visual one at that with touches of what I suppose is "magical realism".  The setting is the Three Gorges Dam, which is a hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River in south-central China.   At the time of the film the city that will be flooded by the dam is being demolished and the residents of the community there are being relocated.  

Han Sanming is a coal miner who is, after 16 years trying to find his wife, who left him with her child years before.  In order to support himself he works for a demolition crew engaged in the dismantling of the city.  Throughout the film you see scenes of groups of men swinging sledge hammers on the gradually disintegrating landscape.

In a parallel story Shen Hong comes looking for her husband, whom she hasn't seen for 2 years, who apparently has a better job, perhaps as an engineer and when she finds him, she asks for a divorce.

The conversations are laconic, and the silences between words are often long.  It conveys a portrait of people that are stoical and long-suffering.  It is at the same time a picture of modern China, where the characters have cell phones and i-pads.  Perhaps in a society with still considerable political repression it is the habit of those living under it to be laconic and silent.

  

In any case the visual element is very strong and the cinematography dazzling.  You see things going on which are not remarked on in any way but which naturally leave an impression.   For example during a demolition scene you see a strange group of workers enclosed in gowns and masks and other protective clothing spraying something.  Meanwhile not far away are the demolition workers who are stripped to the waist and working and sweating in the hot sun.  

In another scene a large stone monument suddenly lifts off like a rocket ship into the air.  Another scene shows Sanming sitting and eating somewhere at a restaurant, and at the next table you see a group of persons dressed in old and elaborately decorated regalia sitting around a table thumbing their cell phones. 

And in the penultimate scene of the movie you see someone in the distance walking a tightrope in the style of a flying Wallenda, incongruously against a backdrop of the ever-ongoing demolitions.

I don't claim to understand everything I saw in the film but the plight of ordinary people in the massive upheavals witnessed in just a couple of generations in China is hard not to see. 

There is an unmistakable kinship that all humans share with their fellow human beings no matter how distant they are and how divergent the cultural setting.  We all make do with what we have and do our best to survive.