I’ll admit to some trepidation when I sat down to watch almost four hours of what could have been a (very) still life about an elephant sitting still! Instead, it’s not really anything to do with an actual pachyderm but more a collection of stories involving four young citizens of Manzhouli. This isn’t a place where very much happens and the opportunities available to these folks aren’t really any more appealing than they were to their parents, or maybe even their’s too. “Bu” (Yuchang Peng) snaps after constantly being bullied at school; “Ling” (Uvin Wang) goes to the same school, only she’s decided to do a bunk from her own home and then there’s “Cheng” (Zhang Yu) who has some suicidal demons to address. To finish off this quadrumvirate, “Mr. Wang” (Zi Xi) is trying to stop his son from condemning him to spending what’s left of his life in an old folks home - somewhere he feels he’s nowhere near ready to go. What is ensues now is largely bleak. There isn’t really another word for the downbeat nature of this almost entirely pace-free introspective on four people, three deaths, too much gloom and doom and maybe just one too many scenes of despair. Why watch it then? Well, it is an eerily creative piece of cinema that at times offers us drama, at others more of a documentary and along the way it looks at issues of grief and loneliness in an authentic sort of fashion and the fact that this is all condensed into one single twenty-four hour period gives it an intensity that vacillates between the emotional and the ridiculous. At times you do wonder if the auteur (Bo Hu) was just on the mother of all downers when he put this together, until you notice - especially with Yuchang Peng and Zi Xi, that so little of this is down to the dialogue and so much to the less-is-more style of the personable acting. Indeed, it could almost be a silent film but for the acoustics that help convey their melancholy effectively. Now the other elephant - the one in the room, is does this have to be so very, very long? I reckon not and at times it is so ponderously self-indulgent that the potency starts to become affected. Scenarios develop for the sake of dramatic licence rather than because they necessarily augment or advance the story of the characters. As with most features that focus on suicide and it’s aftermath, it’s neither a cheery nor an easy watch, but it’s a powerful film to look at and it’s study of just how humanity deals with everything from chronic sadness to mundanity makes it worth a watch. I would recommend you see it in a cinema, though. It might be a death too far if you try to remain focussed watching it on the telly.
