Drowning, not waving, in China

OneWorld UK

Daniel Nelson

Still Life starts with a huge advantage: it is set in a town being demolished brick by brick, stone by stone, before being flooded by Chinas vast Three Gorges dam.

Demolition usually implies renewal, but here it engenders an eerie, stifling, life-squeezing atmosphere. It is as though the air is being sucked out of the town. Hand-painted signs appear high up walls marking the level which the next stage of flooding will reach.

This backdrop, though fascinating, is not why this is such an absorbing film. Into the town come two people in search of lost partners: a coalminer whose wife left him, with their child, 12 years before, and a woman who hasnt heard from her husband for two years.

The first 15 minutes when Han Sanming arrives on the ferry to find his wife are a joy though not for him, as he is suckered into rip-off magic show designed to part naïve visitors from their cash, is taken by motorbike taxi to an address that turns out to be underwater and is charged double for a room until the landlord is accused of ruining the tourist industry.

Its a good natured, life-as-it-is tour de force of acute observation and sharp dialogue. Brilliant.

The film, voted Best Film at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, doesnt quite maintain this level for, and director San Xia Hao Rens slow pace and long takes will be difficult for audiences expecting the speed and rapid cutting of mainstream cinema. Its the cinematic equivalent of Italys slow food movement: to be savoured, not rushed. One reviewer dismissed it as a torpid tale of discontents in back-of-beyond China.

Patient viewers will be rewarded, however, as the poet of Chinas transformation unfolds the two stories. Both have an interesting twist, but its the unhurried honesty, the telling details, the humanity that give the film its resonance.

When the lights went up at a screening at the British Museum in January, I asked the mainland Chinese journalist next to me what she thought. Its life in China, she said. Its Chinese people.

* Still Life is showing at the BFI Southbank 1-28 February