Finding the picks of films from Asia to view for the ICM fest last year fascinating,I looked forward to seeing what had been selected this year. Aware of the mainstream titles from China, I was interested to find that an "indie" movie had been picked for viewing,which led to me travelling Kaili.
The plot:
Working at a small clinic in Kaili,one of the doctors called Chen Sheng begins to feel a need to meet one of his cousins for the first time in ages. Stepping aboard a train with no destination in mind, Sheng discovers small towns that are caught in the midst's of time.
View on the film:
Sending Sheng across the countryside on motorbike and train, writer/director Gan Bi & cinematographer Tianxing Wang follow each part of the journey in beautiful tracking shots,with the centre- piece being a one-take 40 minute section, that does not go for anything flashy,to breath in the rural atmosphere,with Bi keeping the camera at a distance,so the viewer can see the unfolding of everyday life Sheng witnesses. Going on the road with Sheng, the screenplay by Bi gives the dialogue a naturalistic, poetic quality,that wash the screen as Sheng, (played by a very good Yongzhong Chen) casts his eyes across every town in search of his cousin, as Sheng gets the Kaili Blues.
97% - Critics
84% - Audience
7.2Plot summary
In the mystical,subtropical province of Guizhou,there is a small county clinic surrounded by fog.At the Kaili clinic,there are two doctors who live quiet,lonely lives.One of the doctors,Chen Sheng,embarks on a journey by train to find his nephew, who had been abandoned by his brother. On the way to Zhenyuan ,Chen Sheng came across a place called Dang Mai, where time seemed to flow both forwards and backwards, the lives of the local people a complete mystery. He experiences his own past and future,lending him insight into his own life. Once Chen arrives at Zhen Yuan, rather than approaching his nephew, he watches secretly from a distance, he is surprised to find that his nephew flourished in the absence of his father, and decides not to interfere in his life. Before he had left Kaili, he had promised his colleague that he w ould stop by the home of her former lover to deliver some items, but upon his arrival, he is told that the man had passed away, and he leaves the box of mementos with the son of his colleague's former lover. Chen once again boards the train to return home. His mind is troubled, he cannot decide whether he believes that the world as he experiences it, is a product of his imagination, or if he is just a part of some large collective dream.
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Blue Kaili.
Loved the extended tracking shot, didn't much care for anything else
Long before three-quarters of an hour had passed watching this one I was really struggling. Nothing had engaged me on any level and I could not really understand what was meant to be so good about this film. But then something pretty great happened – a 40 minute single shot which tracked various characters over huge distances and which was technically quite brilliant. I found myself actually pretty mesmerised by the sheer audacity of this single take. I would cautiously say that this shot is worth the price of admission alone, I say 'cautiously' because I really didn't like anything else about this movie at all! I am seriously thinking I maybe did not connect with events on account of a cultural gap of some kind because I did experience a pretty severe disconnect with this one, the 40 minute long take notwithstanding. It seemed to be about a man in search of a relative and it does have some nice photography from China's Guizhou Province. But if this one has a chapter index on its DVD release, I would maybe just suggest you jump directly to the extended take and just watch that. That may be sacrilege to some but I figure it is enough for me; in any case, I think this sequence of cinematic wizardry is what this film will ultimately be remembered for. A word often associated with this film is 'poetic' but I suspect if it was a poem it would be one of those annoying ones which doesn't rhyme.
Bi Gan is very possible, "the" most electrifying discoveries of recent Chinese cinema
Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan's awards-winning debut, KAILI BLUES, in fact, the literal translation of its Chinese title is "roadside picnic", which appears to be the name of a frayed paperback collection of poems we can glance in one scene relatively near the beginning, and indeed poem suffuses in Bi's oneiric idiom, told through the voice-over of our protagonist Chen Shen (Chen Yongzhong).
The opening shot is a nearly 360-degree roving take setting against in a fixed position, a sparse clinic where Chen works with an elderly doctor (Zhao),they live in Kaili, a foggy, soggy, slight crummy town in China's southeast, subtropical Guizhou province. In lieu of plying audience with Chen's backstory, Bi cogently puts beauty derived from quotidian scenery in a salient place where a laconic storyline takes its form most subtly, the place where a young boy Weiwei (Luo) and his father Crazy Face (Xie) lives is decrepit and noisy to a fault, but strikingly there is a cascade just in vicinity, which promptly gives the said place an almost surreal grandeur, also Bi manifests his ingenuity by capturing the reflection of a passing train on the wall, a blunt intrusion brutally shattering the homely equilibrium but who can deny its aesthetic signification, plus, a passing train would later give the film's ending a divine "turning-back-time" coup-de-maître.
Soon it transpires that Chen is an ex-convict, and Crazy Face is his brother, but there is bad blood between them (which always has to do with family inheritance, properties in particular),Chen notices that Crazy Face is a deliberately negligent parent and suspects that he is going to sell Weiwei. So when Weiwei is sent away to Monk (Yang),a former gangster ringleader Chen once worked for and for whom he is locked behind the bars, he embarks on an excursion to look for his nephew Zhenyuan, and concurrently, to locate his colleague's old flame, who has Miao pedigree and now falls gravely ill.
The magic occurs when he reaches a town called Dang Mai, where Bi employs an audacious long take running over 40 minutes following Chen and other people he meets there, in particular, a local girl Yangyang (Guo),who is going to work as a tourist guide in Kaili and a young man also named Weiwei (Yu) who overtly carries a torch for her but she seems not to reciprocate. When reality, past, dream are entwined in that bucolic loop, Bi even risks betraying the camera's own existence in order to achieve this cinematic wizardry, is this Weiwei is a future version of Chen's nephew? Does the hairdresser (Liu) he meets is a reincarnation of his deceased wife? When Chen wears the shirt which is delivered to his colleague's Miao lover, is he reliving an imaginative past to give away the cassette, the pledge of romance and courtship? There are cues and incongruities, but the whole enterprise is so remarkably done that should it be singled out as an absolute high water mark from a tenderfoot in the sphere of filmmaking.
Taking the mantle from Chinese indie trailblazers (Jia Zhangke is the obvious object of reference),Bi Gan has a particular knack of marshaling amateur cast and sampling everyday settings to evince a strangely, but also affectingly enigmatic quality bordering on an amalgam of warmth, other-worldliness and allure, converging with its poetic undertow, kismet-galvanized mythos, beguiling scenery shots, peculiar camera composition and astonishing visual fluidity, plus other perverse quirks: the movie's title materializes roughly 30 minutes into its duration, and its opening credits are read out loud which harks back to Pasolini's THE HAWK AND THE SPARROW (1966, 7.5/10) where the credits are given a singsong treatment, KAILI BLUES is the whole package for art cinephiles, and more encouragingly, Bi Gan is very possible, "the" most electrifying discoveries of recent Chinese cinema.