This is the only film Chinese filmmaker Hu Bo made before he ended his own life shortly after wrapping production. The writer-director-editor’s suicide hangs uncomfortably over the entire film, especially given the subject matter. It is kind of like watching Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead shooting heroin after the actor’s overdose; here, two side characters in the film kill themselves during the nearly four-hour runtime. Even still, An Elephant Sitting Still is more than just a fascination piece for mourning a lost auteur gone far too soon.
Shot in a social realist fashion ripped straight from the Dardennes brothers, the film follows – literally, with the camera hovering near characters, usually over their left shoulders as they walk, in extremely long takes – four different protagonists as they attempt to survive an especially challenging day in an unnamed provincial Chinese city. There are two high school-aged children, Wei Bu (Yuchang Peng) – who has the strongest claim to being the film’s primary protagonist – and Huang Ling (Uvin Wang) as well as a slightly older ne’er-do-well chain smoker, Yu Cheng (Yu Zhang) and the retirement-age military veteran Wang Jin (Zi Xi). Aside from Yu Cheng, the characters are not strangers to one another: Wei Bu is Wang Jin’s neighbor and Huang Ling’s school friend.
An Elephant Sitting Still is a bleak film portraying the forgotten souls who populate the edges of China’s economic miracle of 21st century economic development. None of the protagonists are factory workers literally slaving in the dark satanic mill of some subsidiary of a subsidiary of a conglomerate with a contract to provide smart phones to Apple; they are instead economically marginal characters whose only connection to the story of China’s overwhelming marketization-driven globalization are the wifi-enabled devices all but Wang Jin carry in their pockets. Still, this is a fable of capitalism and its discontents and rejects.
These are lost souls: Wei Bu is on the lam from a vengeance-seeking family after accidentally injuring/killing a school bully who fell down the steps in a schoolyard scuffle. The “home” he is forced to flee is desolate and characterized by an abusive father. Huang Ling is in an exploitative sexual relationship with the vice dean of her school, reduced to a rape victim with a vanished father and over-stretched mother ultimately also forced to leave her home. Yu Cheng is the supposed agent of vengeance searching the streets for Wei Bu, but Yu Cheng disliked his brother and is more concerned with his failing romantic relationships and the suicide of his best friend earlier in the day, a death he played a very strong role in prompting. Finally, Wang Jin, who loves his granddaughter but cannot stand his petulant son-in-law, who is trying to kick Wang Jin out of his own apartment and place him in some retirement home, is forced to try to make a life elsewhere. All four ultimately resolve to make the same pilgrimage: a snowy nocturnal sojourn via public transportation to the nearby city of Manzhouli, where there is rumored to be an elephant who, rather than acting as an elephant is expected to, merely sits on the ground waiting.
It is clear that Hu Bo is interested in social commentary, but perhaps his blatant commitment to critique dulls the edge; An Elephant Sitting Still works better as a character study and a broad metaphor than it stands up as the sort of activism-inflected cinema of someone like Ken Loach. It is better for it. Loach is great, but he has not made a film like this one. The symbol of an elephant basically on strike from quotidian existence is the ideal analogy for characters whose only desire is to withdraw from the whole grift of supposed meritocratic social functioning. This is a slow-burn film meant to emphasize the myth of upward mobility under capitalism and show the lie that buoys the dream of a consumerist paradise of human flourishing. There are no direct politics, but An Elephant Sitting Still is profoundly politically. It is not subtle, by any means, but it also does not bang the viewer over the head.
The strongest feature of the film is the cinematography: extremely long, often elaborate tracking shots, layered one after another. The photography reveals many glimpses of China’s smaller urban agglomerations, the interiors of apartments and interiors of banal public spaces. As a viewer in the United States, such visuals are invaluable: how else could one see what a provincial town looks like out on the edges of China. The nameless setting of An Elephant Sitting Still is definitely not Shanghai or Beijing and without such a film, would be forever unknown to the vast majority of the world’s people.
The four-hour runtime and the creator’s suicide are likely daunting to many perspective viewers, but this is a film well worth the effort, and it is far more than an elaborate suicide note.
Photo courtesy of KimStim
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