My Rating : 8/10

'An Elephant Sitting Still' - what can be said about this masterpiece? At 3 hours 50 minutes it's not something one can rush through. It requires patience and empathy from the viewer. There's no way any normal moviegoer will not find it boring and dull at times but that's where you've gotta find that right mood and environment to really appreciate this gem. This is definitely an acquired taste.

I am a huge fan of movies that deal with inner torment and involve the viewer's absolute trust and surrender. Cries and Whispers, Ida, Mouchette, Stray, The Piano Teacher, In My Father's Den are some of my favourites when it comes to this type of cinema and now 'An Elephant Sitting Still' can be added to this list as well.

Sad to know that the director is no more. R.I.P. and thank you for sending this message out to the world.

'An Elephant Sitting Still' is the most underrated movie of 2019. Sure, artsy-fartsy critics raved about it but the mass public will never know it. After all, it's a 3hr50min slow moving, Chinese epic about depression. In a world of super heroes and Instagram, patience is considered a handicap. Thankfully, there's an elephant of sadness and irony. It was the only movie by Bo Hu, the director and writer. He killed himself afterwards, ensuring that it'll become a cult classic, the greatest suicide 'letter'.

I guess director Bo Hu eventually makes his point, but it's a long, four hour slog getting there. With an exceedingly existential approach, the film is an excruciating exercise in patience to sit through, of people living lives of quiet desperation. Perhaps not surprising, as unless you're Xi Jinping or a member of his Politburo in China, the mass of citizens living there have to make do as best they can under the conditions in which they live, much of them in rural poverty. The film follows the lives of four individuals caught up in circumstances that bedevil their existence, with a common thread of each feeling not responsible for their situations, Yu Cheng (Yu Zhang) being the most obvious example. He blames the woman he would be lovers with for the suicide of a friend, after he sleeps with the friend's wife. Discovering the affair, the man jumped off his apartment building to his death. I imagine it would be easy enough to rationalize this sort of thinking, but from an outsider's point of view, it's entirely senseless.

The movie appears to have won a fair share of awards in international competition, but as I read over the list, I have to wonder what sort of judges sat through the picture long enough to bestow them. Individual scenes are statically dragged out repeatedly. Done obviously to prolong one's immersion into the lives and suffering of the characters, it's not unrealistic to state that the movie could have been done in about half the time without sacrificing nuance. The film does have it's adherents as evidenced by the high proportion of '10' evaluations by the reviewers on this board, along with the entire body of user ratings. I'm not sorry I made my way through the entire picture, but it did leave me groaning after about the three hour mark. On the plus side, the cinematography is exceptional if bleak, with emphasis on shades of gray throughout. It's as if the use of color would have rendered the story and characters more optimistic than what one experiences. Also, given the amount of emphasis stated by the principals in mentioning the existence of an immobile elephant in some distant city of Manzhouli, we never get to see the passive pachyderm.