Sanxia Haoren (Still Life) (2006)
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90% of critics liked it
(48 reviews) -
77% of users liked it
(3,448 ratings)
Jia Zhang Ke's haunting minimalist drama Still Life (aka Sanxia Haoren) takes as its focal point the real-life construction of the Three Gorges Hydro Project and it accompanying massive dam over the Yangtze River in China (allegedly the largest manmade dam in the world) -- a project that… More Jia Zhang Ke's haunting minimalist drama Still Life (aka Sanxia Haoren) takes as its focal point the real-life construction of the Three Gorges Hydro Project and it accompanying massive dam over the Yangtze River in China (allegedly the largest manmade dam in the world) -- a project that required engineers to flood the surrounding territories, including the two millennia-old city of Fengjie. Jia interweaves two stories in connection with the geographical transformation of that area. In the first, Han Sanming (Han Sanming), a miner from northern China, revisits the vicinity after a 16-year absence and attempts to find his wife and his adult daughter -- trying to locate them at addresses that now exist underwater. In the second story, nurse Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) also returns to the site of Fengjie and scours the area for her husband, who has been estranged from her for two years, and who, it seems, has become consumed by the work and lifestyle of an executive. The marriage, it turns out, is irreparable. Meanwhile, as a documentary-style backdrop to these stories, the old structures of Fengjie are continually destroyed -- walls brought to crumbling heaps, towers blown to bits -- and new, makeshift structures installed as replacements. The film thus becomes a sad-eyed meditation on the nature of social change and progress, but it is one that requires the audience to extract these deeper themes and tropes on its own, via inference and deduction. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Directed By
- Zhang Ke Jia
- Written By
- Jia Zhang Ke
- Genres
- Drama, Romance
Unrated,
- In Theaters
- Sep 5, 2006 Wide
- Studio
- New Yorker Films
Critic Reviews
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Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present.
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Ted Fry, Seattle Times
An extraordinary glimpse into the psychology, subtext and austere reality of modern Chinese culture.
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G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
Never has destruction looked more beautiful than the demolished buildings in Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life.
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Jonathan F. Richards, Film.com
Writer-director Jia Zhangke is a keen observer of the effects of the break-neck modernization that is stampeding China toward a future that no one can predict, control, or contain.
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Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun-Times
Jia Zhang-ke is a new auteur making his mark. Embraced abroad on the international festival circuit, if less welcome on screens in China, this writer-director works in a genre that could be called globalist.
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Cast
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Tao Zhao
as Shen Hong
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Han Sanming
as Han Sinming
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Wang Hong Wei
as Wang Dong Ming
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Li Zhubin
as Guo Bing
- Xiang Haiyu
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Zhou Lin
as Huang Mao
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Ma Lizhen
as Missy Ma
- Sanming Han
- Hongwei Wang
