In his latest film, the director Jia Zhang-Ke finds an encapsulation of present-day China in the town of Fengjie, an ancient site that has lately been flooded as part of the Three Gorges dam project. The film takes place during the town's demolition and follows two characters, a middle-aged man (Han Sanming) and a young woman (Zhao Tao), who are separately looking for loved ones from whom they have become estranged. This pair's wanderings allow Jia to survey his homeland's zeitgeist in a series of undemonstrative and sometimes cryptic scenes. Jia is highly regarded by some, but his films (which include Platform and Unknown Pleasures) have never struck me as having enough in them to justify their slow pace. Still Life has the virtue of a strong mood - one combining mournfulness with a sense that China's upheavals may yet be for the best - but it's still an endurance test. Were an elderly tortoise to move across the foreground of any scene, it would appear to scorch along at phenomenal speed.
PG, 112 mins