Streaming on YouTube - Janice Tong's 🎥FILMIC POSTCARD | - AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (Hu Bo, China, 2017)

 An Elephant Sitting Still 大象席地而坐 - Longing, violence and an invitation to voyage

 

It’s a beautiful, melancholic opening scene, the close-up of the young Chinese man, Yu Cheng, frames the entire shot — he is sitting at the edge of the bed looking down; rubbing his shoulders. In the darkened room you can still easily make out that he is forlorn. The weight of his disappointment and ennui seeps through the screen into your living room. And yet, as a viewer, you are already captivated thirty seconds in. A voice over, his, slowly tells the story that was recalled to him, of an elephant in Manzhouli who just sits there, despite being poked at by forks or fed by the zookeepers; and the frame abruptly cuts to a snow packed ground, the camera jolts slightly with each step forward — a hollow cry of a bird in the soundscape punctuates the camera’s singular forward movement — is it a non-diegetic insert? 

The lovelorn petty criminal Yu Cheng (R) played by Yu Zhang,
one of director Hu Bo's close friends

In any case it’s definitely from the point of view of the person walking. It’s hard work but the steps advance nonetheless over the white snow-scarred ground; bits of black vegetation poking through here and there. The voice over continues with the story as we’re introduced visually to other characters in the film: an old man with a dog (Grandfather Jin); a young girl (Huang Ling) who is just waking up; more snow; then back to that initial young man we saw, now smoking his first cigarette of the morning. He’s looking out of an opened window — a smoggy, nondescript view, of low lying houses — an indication, perhaps, of an industrialised provincial China; before cutting to the interior of another room with another young man (Wei Bu) taping up some kind of a stick, no doubt, it’s intended use is for self-defence. 

 

This 3 hour 50 mins film is elegiac, like a Homeric hymn, filled with treachery, longing, humanity, violence, tenderness, cruelty, disregard, beauty and poetry. The way the story folds in and out of the four main characters’ lives is guided by the camera; fluid and melodious — pulling us gently through their single, violent (yet seemingly calm) and transformative day. Dawn till darkness; that’s all it takes – and nothing, no one, will be the same again. 

 

Wei Bu (played by Yuchang Peng) is the young man with the stick; a quiet high schooler who is berated by his desultory and belligerent father as soon as he steps out of his bedroom — eventually, sticking up for a friend, he pushes the school bully Yu Shuai down a flight of stairs. Yu Shuai’s brother Yu Cheng (played by Hu Bo’s close friend, actor Yu Zhang) is the first young man in the opening scene; a softly spoken, heartbroken, petty criminal. Wang Jin (played by Zi Xi) is the grandfather figure with the dog, he has been asked to move out of his own apartment by his son and daughter-in-law to an old people’s home. And finally, the young girl and classmate of Wei Bu is Huang Ling (played by newcomer Uvin Wang), it is her birthday today. 

Classmates, Wei Bu (Yuchang Peng) and Huang Ling
(Uvin Wang) in the background

It matters little how the narrative unfolds — to name it would take away the film’s enigmatic grandeur; just know that it is meticulously done. The film leaves you devastated and yet at no time do you not fall in love with all of the main characters. You understand them — it’s as though Hu Bo is continually sharing a secret, a keyhole through which you get a glimpse of their lives. The acting is profound, naturalistic; the beautiful melancholic music by Hualun (花伦) and soundscape adds a kind of volume to the scenes. Finally, Hu’s translucent, opaque and leached out images coupled with Chao Fan’s camera work - an itinerant roaming eye, the action is in the background – and always out of focus, whilst you are immersed in the close-ups of the main characters. You get into their psyche, and you feel them, their anger, their pain, their control, and most of all, their longing for another life. This film is poetic, and luminous like the sky.

 

Hu Bo’s ode to the forgotten generations, of which he is one: the young (those who are in their late teens and twenties) and the elderly (those who have seen rapid change but are now discarded like the trash that litters the streets). The very young (such as the Jin’s granddaughter) are too trusting to feel the spiral.  Raised in this climate during their formative years, the future offers none other than the same kind of displacement learnt by the others. The bitterness of the generation inbetween the young and the elderly riles you with their spit; their resentment and their toughened will to survive. 

 

I don’t think I’ve been as moved since I first saw Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies back in 2000. N says to me that he thought of the leviathan in Tarr’s film when he thinks of the elephant in this one.* I thought the same; a magnificent beast reduced to a ringside show. But, the leviathan is also us, it is the monster we have made of ourselves — far more ‘grotesque’ than any whale or elephant. And the elephant’s stillness? Perhaps Grandfather Jin’s cautionary words at the bus terminal: ‘You think it’s different elsewhere? It's all the same everywhere' and ‘you stay, you adapt to your surroundings’ is an attempt to us that the elephant’s stillness is his way of adapting: and that it might as well be a stuffed leviathan. 

Hu Bo

I believe that Hu’s film is actually an invitation to voyage — to find a way out of the current predicament despite what the world, the government, your family, progress or advancement has handed to you. Very sadly, Hu Bo did — in the most extreme, or absolute form of exit — he ended his own life shortly after completing this film; his farewell is our immense loss.

 

This film, An Elephant Sitting Still, is his love letter (from the hell of his bed, as per Baudelaire) to us,  — those who are left behind.

Watch the film on YouTube if you click here

 

 

 

*There is a lot of truth in this, as Hu Bo applied to do a masterclass in Shanghai with Tarr. The two met: the film was in its raw form but almost done. When he first met Hu, he immediately noticed how tall he was, but soon realised Hu was a very fragile person – sensitive to others’ suffering. Tarr felt the loss of Hu Bo personally (he had been travelling with the film and introducing it at festivals). At the TIFF introduction, he said “I lost him, the world lost him.” And how true that is…