Lauded and top-gonged in China, this elephant has appeared in parts of the western world with barely a trumpet. Yet you should see it: it’s extraordinary. (Un-press-shown in the UK, the film has a few days left of its ICA run, ending on December 20. There are select showings later outside London.)
It is long: four hours. It will make your face long: it is not a happy film. And, with no exaggeration, it could be called a gifted artist’s suicide note. First-time writer-director and former author Hu Bo (whose two novels caused a sensation in China) killed himself at age 29 soon after completing the film.
In an urban landscape like a greying Limbo — breeze-block ghettos, dismal tenement blocks, spectral streets — four characters interact in a social drama-thriller that moves with the pace of a glacier. The schoolboy (Peng Yuchang) is nearly anomic, yet steadily defiant of the gangland goons threatening him after his assault on a school bully. The schoolgirl (Wang Yuwen) drifts near-catatonically through an affair with the school’s head. There’s an old man primed for stoical revolt after his son says “Dad, please go to a nursing home” — he leaves to wander the cutpurse streets like a cut-price Lear — and there’s a petty hoodlum, the assault victim’s brother, whose best friend throws himself from a balcony in the first scene, after the hoodlum beds his wife.