Moral Landscapes.('Still Life' and 'Cassandra's Dream')(Movie review)

In 2004, the Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke made a strange, poky but fascinating movie, "The World," set in a Beijing theme park outfitted with sizable replicas of St. Peter's, the Taj Mahal, and the World Trade Center, all of them moldering in the polluted yellow air. The story, such as it is, features the halfhearted love affairs of the young people who work in this gruesome place. Inarticulately dissatisfied, they listlessly pursue one another by cell phone and text message, seemingly too alienated to get anything romantic going. Jia put some vagrant streaks of humor in the movie, but there is no mistaking his dismay. Whatever "The World" meant to the Chinese, it appeared to outsiders as a melancholy satire of China in an awkward state of transition between Communism and capitalism. The first system was sputtering, and the second hadn't quite arrived, or, at least, not in any satisfactory form, and the young people, caught in this limbo, couldn't decide what they wanted their existence to be.

In "Still Life," completed in 2006, and just opening here, Jia has entered a more literal limbo. Almost ninety years ago, Sun Yat-sen proposed building a hydroelectric dam to control the flooding of the immense and turbulent Yangtze River. The Three Gorges project, a descendant of Sun's idea, finally got under way in 1994. So far, thousands of people have worked on the huge concrete structure, which stretches about a mile and a half across the river. The devastating social and environmental consequences have been widely reported: communities have been engulfed, and more than a million people have been forced to relocate. "Still Life" takes place in what is left of the town of Fengjie. Sanming (Han Sanming), a miner who shows up from another part of the country in search of his wife (Ma Lizhen), who had been working in the area, asks where a certain street is, and someone points to the middle of the river. Higher on the banks, deserted buildings rot in the summer heat. Except for the elderly, who are too tired to move, and the groups of workmen slowly demolishing the remaining buildings with hand tools, just about everyone has vanished. Fengjie is a ghost town. Despite all this desolation and depression, however, "Still Life" is an extremely beautiful movie: the river and the green mountains on both sides of it extend into the distance in majestic panoply; gray clouds hang over the scene like painted backdrops. Jia, working with the cinematographer Yu Likwai, is incapable of an ugly or a nonresonant image: the air is moist and palpable, and even the thick, rusted pipes of abandoned factories seem to breathe.

Once again, we're caught between the past and an unarrived future. A local Communist boss deals with angry complaints about accidents and relocation as if fending off flies with a rolled-up newspaper--he swats, but to no effect. In Fengjie, as far as we can see, there's no social structure or authority, and the commercial life of capitalism hasn't taken hold. Inanition and mere things have overwhelmed the human presence, as in one of Antonioni's empty urban landscapes. After a while, another stranger tentatively appears--Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), a lovely young woman looking for her soldier husband, who took off for Fengjie a couple of years ago. She and Sanming never meet, but they both find their mates, with differing results. As in "The World," the story is minimal, or intermittent, the mood everything. The workmen sit around stripped to the waist, yet the milieu is thoroughly asexual. The characters approach one another gingerly and speak slowly, with long pauses. To our eyes, they seem becalmed, even affectless, but I can't read silences in Chinese dialogue--I can't tell if they're produced by awkwardness or by hostility. And I wonder if Jia, a master filmmaker without a motor, doesn't need to find a setting where there's some vibrant, messy life going on. As with all poets of desolation, he seems to deplore what he creates, but it's just possible that he feels comfortable in the beautiful, strange, blank spaces.

If "Still Life" represents one artist's idea of China--as a hushed nullity--the frenetic, sexually combustible young people in Lou Ye's "Summer Palace" suggest another China altogether. The movie chronicles fourteen years, from 1987 to 2001, in the life of Yu Hong (Hao Lei), a soulful girl who leaves the provinces, goes to university in Beijing, and carries on passionate affairs with a handsome student, Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), and many ...