Da xiang xi di er zuo

A masterpiece of the highest order, the film is in the canon of cinema what Raskolnikov is in the canon of literature. A film that can be made only as a one-off: either the genius fades or dies or abandons the ambition. Like Gogol. Like Bo Hu, who committed suicide soon after making the film. And the world he paints in his film, very much like Plemya, is a desolate one, where everything is shit. The difference with Plemya being that the film also says, maybe desperately, that one has to look for something else, that there must be something else.

Da xiang xi di er zuo (int'l title: An Elephant Sitting Still) is about an elephant one never sees. Very few will bet on him, very few will leave their mundane chores to go to a godforsaken place to go and meet him. It is not that the others are happy, it is not that the others are doing something meaningful. It is just that everyone's tired, and they fail to see the charm, the humour, the silver lining that the elephant presents. They fail to see that the world may yet present some degree of hope if the elephant is sitting still all by himself. They fail to smile, they fail to laugh. They will never even listen to him bellowing, for they have given up on him without even having known him or about him. For them, there is no something else. There is this and this and then that, and then this and this and then that that. Life for them is a cycle, but not a cycle which liberates you, making you take everything as a drama and letting you indulge in the colossal joke of a still, alive elephant: no, a cycle, which begins with this and ends with that, the two ends of routine that they know too well, never straying once out of it. They are too messed up to stray. They are in fact like the domesticated elephants, who do remain quite still, chained early in their childhoods, so they do sit still, and yet that's not charming, for they were chained, they are not wild elephants sitting still. Is the one in Manzhouli, the one who's sitting still, a wild one or a domesticated one? Is Wang Jin right, saying that there's nothing else, or is Wei Bu right, hoping against all experience that there is, that a wild one does exist in Manzhouli? Will we ever know? From our own experience, we will if we go and search one, but only incommunicably. But if we don't find one, then what?

One will probably never know why Bo Hu committed suicide, but do not be misled into thinking of the film as a despairing realistic piece because of that. The film's beauty lies in Wei Bu's insistence and Wang Jin's implicit flickeringly alive innocence, when he does accept Wei Bu's offer to go and meet the elephant. If ever there was a film singing the most articulate song about the human condition, here is one, and I doubt if ever there will be another. It helps matters even more when one witnesses supremely virtuous cinematography: a cinematography which though so talented yet slips into consciousness, making one steep into the film's gloom. Very different from the much celebrated cinematography of a recent Polish hit Zimna wojna (Cold War), where the camera is excellent, yet is guilty of celebrating itself rather than slipping in the shadow of the film's substance. But, then, that is the difference: An Elephant Sitting Still is all substance, little style, whereas Cold War is mostly style, little substance. And it is probably this lingering bitterness that led Bo Hu to make this film: this world, where excellence is cast out and where it's demanded that films be shortened to the usual length of 2 hours or less. Bo Hu did not, and has made an immortal name for himself in the history of cinema for centuries.

A final word about the excellent performances in the film, most particularly by Yu Zhang playing Yu Cheng. It is difficult to play a restrained violent person, or rather a person whose profession is violence but who is otherwise not violent. A bit like a wild elephant.