Jia Zheng-ke is hardly a household word. The jury at the 2007 Venice Bienniale conferred on his film 'Still Life' the high honour of best film. Beijing has banned the film. The jury in Venice may have found influences of Antonioni in Jia's film, wot, with its long passages of feet leading here and there. It is unsentimental albeit nostalgic about two dramas with little to connect them other than the man who is looking for his daughter after 16 years, and a woman who is looking for a divorce from her husband who has little time for her. The two are from China's Shanxi province, and thus the connexion. The pace of the film is slow and trying on the viewer, but socialogically speaking, it is a telling tale of the effect of the 3 Gorge Dam's effect on the lives of the ordinary Chinese. Mao's dream, spurred on by Deng Xiao Peng's fast, short march on the capitalist road, has turned China on its ear. 'It's alright to get rich', says he, and the rush for the almight renminbi yuan becomes a torrent of corruption, greed, and onerous burden for the poor peasant and worker who once the Communist Party took care of after its own fashion. As Lenin remarked the loosenly of socialist praxis gives once again birth to petty bourgeois production...and how and more! And the attraction of Hong Kong cinema stars like Chow Young Fat offer a model of the streetwise and smart hero, and the CantoPop songs which offer up sugar plum dreams of romance and longing and rejection in love...to lessen the drabness and the brutality of everyday existence. As we see through 'Still Life' the older reflexes of fuedal China re emerge with vengeance...and this is no better illustrated than the meeting of the coalminer from Shanxi who is looking for his daughter meets his wife who is a debt slave to a boat captain because he brother owes him 30.000 yuan!
How does one interpret the title? is it a 'Still Life' as we think of a painting? or is it an affirmation that in spite of life's vicissitudes life still goes on? That is up to the man or woman who pays for his seat to see this stark, sober film to make out for himeself
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