Time travels

Ash is Purest White (d. Jia Zhang-ke)

The Long Day’s Journey into the Night (d. Bi Gan)

An Elephant Sitting Still (d. Bo Hu)

Is this what state approved and film festival approved quasi-art quasi-commercial cinema looks like? Ash is well-lighted and bland. Is this the only story they could come up with, where the female protagonist is played by director’s wife, about China Inc.? It’s not quite Antonioni but it’s also there, with its conscious highlighting of architecture and urban landscapes. It’s a well-produced, somewhat intelligent bad cinema. In contrast take a look at The Long Day’s Journey into Night, another bad romance set in modern day provincial China. The story is thin too, but what makes it remarkable is the the twisting of time where the son’s love affair and his mother’s entwine and possibly meet with that noted long take. (Here the references are clearer: Tsai Ming Liang and Tarkovsky.) Ash has none of the time looping because it hews closely to the state ideology and censorship rules. The film gives the Chinese government some of the luster from the accolades given to a career auteur JZK while the film festival west get to fill in their programming with new product from the director. Long Day’s Journey does the same thing, actually. A less compromising work would be Elephant Sitting Still with its refusal to be a feel good movie, politically. It posits that things have neither been better nor worse despite improved conditions in China. For whom has life improved? Nihilistic but clearer headed than these two other films, it offers the most charitable gesture: “let’s go together” even if the proverbial grass isn’t greener on the other side. How else can anyone refuse such an offer? These are slow, meditative, long films. If anything, they give glimpses of how China is changing so fast that documenting it is to already date oneself, thus these varying statements on temporality embedded within the films.

#2019 #70