When this film came out last year, I read some gushing reviews suggesting it was reinventing the art. In order to find out whether Bi Gan has indeed reinvented, or resurrected cinema, I came to pay my dues. What emerges is the work of a cineaste student let loose with a seemingly infinite budget. There are homages to Welles, Tarkovsky and the rest. There are set piece scenes which any cineaste would die to put together. What there isn’t is much of a story. In some ways the film’s scale seems akin to much modern Chinese cinema (Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, the panoramic vistas of Jia Zhang-Ki, etc). Would it be too much of a reach to suggest that this reflects a culture struggling to come to terms with its new-formed grandiose status? However, Zhang-Ki’s films are rooted in the actuality of Chinese development/ expansion. Whereas Bi Gan is reaching for something altogether more poetic and pretentious, an overview of the history of cinema itself. The absence of an anchor means that, no matter how impressive the imagery, the film feels as though it drifts through a calm sea, going nowhere in particular.
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