Still Life Is Entwined With Present, But Will Outlive Us All

The best American films of 2007 were grounded in specific historical moments, but they transcended their place in time. For example, There Will Be Blood’s outsized performances and Jonny Greenwood’s self-consciously discordant score ensured that the film was not a mere period piece, and even David Fincher’s Zodiac, which was drenched in the 1970s, was as much about our own culture of extreme interrogation procedures as it was about a San Francisco serial killer.

Unlike his American counterparts, Jia Zhangke is not overly concerned with cinematic timelessness or universal relevance. In 2001’s Unknown Pleasures, televisions are on in almost every apartment and Chinese pop music provides an ad hoc soundtrack. His 2004 film, The World (a title both fitting and deceptive), is set in a new, real-life Beijing theme park that features replicas of the world’s great monuments. And Still Life, his most recent narrative feature, takes place in a shifting landscape, near China’s Three Gorges Dam.

In Jia’s earlier films, the setting seemed to recede as the characters’ human dilemmas entered the foreground, and the result was a set of intimate interactions framed and interrupted by a very specific social reality. But in Still Life, place is everywhere, and the human stories are inextricably linked to their surroundings, and to their moment in history.

Rooted in Mao’s grandiose vision but executed with a capitalistic audaciousness, the Three Gorges Dam is a civil engineering project on an impossible scale. Jia lingers on the dam’s current and forthcoming impact—future water lines are painted on building walls, construction is furious, and demolition is omnipresent.

In the film, two people navigate this shifting landscape in search of long-lost family members. Han Sanming has come to the area to look for his wife after 16 years of separation, hoping that she will lead him to their daughter. When he arrives at the site of her apartment building, he sees an enormous river. Like so many of the area’s residents, she has been displaced. Meanwhile, Shen Hong (played by the luminous Tao Zhao, a Jia regular) has come to look for her husband, who has moved to the area to capitalize on the development boom.

In both narratives, the dam has a transformative role, and Jia obviously recognizes its importance. In many of the film’s beautiful and revealing pans across the gray surroundings, the camera slowly moves from the characters to long, thoughtful views of the expanding river valley, the infinite expanse of abandoned buildings, or the effortless ballet of construction workers destroying structures with the smallest of tools.

The camera’s asides speak to the primacy of setting, but they also honor the specificity of a particular place in time. Still Life could not have been made at any other moment in history, and indeed, the landscape that it captures has now disappeared forever.
Unlike Fincher, Jia does not find anachronistic resonance, and unlike Paul Thomas Anderson, he does not complicate his chronology. It’s a still life that’s already obsolete, yet it may outlast most grand, transcendent statements.