"An Elephant Sitting Still": a film of beauty as rare as it is dazzling

On the sidelines of a victorious China, four characters confronted with the evil of living.Hu Bo Sign, before killing himself, a first film full of spleen of dizzying beauty.

If criticism is also an art of staging - literary staging of a sensitivity in relation to a filmic object - an elephant sitting still complexifies this desire to organize a taste around an artistic work in yadding a macabre reality.Because Hu Bo, its 29-year-old Chinese director, committed suicide at the end of the film's post-production.Only analyze this first feature film in the light of this suicide seems reductive.Makeing your criticism a funeral prayer would be lazy.Loading it with a wearing testing value of pathos would be bad taste.But we can't help but think about it from the first images.Would we have seen the same film if its author was not dead?Probably not.

It is first of all important to say that apart from any context, an elephant Sitting Still is in itself an immense film, of romantic beauty - in the Baudelairian sense of the term - as rare as dazzling.The film is inspired by a new written by Hu Bo in 2016.Obedifying the rule of three units, it takes place over a day in a sinister post-industrial city in northern China and follows four characters all confronted, if not in death, at least in despair to live.

The links that unite them form a beautifully arrested tree.A young man must live with the memory of the suicide that his friend committed before his eyes.The latter had just discovered that the first cook him.But he must also take revenge on the attempted homicide on his little brother perpetrated by a comrade.The little brother tries to escape reprisals and police while trying to be loved by a girl who undergoes shame born from the revelation of her affair with a teacher.Finally, an old man crosses the road to these three characters.He is pushed into a retirement home by his children and loses his dog, slaughtered in front of him by a fellow.

The counterpoint to this generalized existential discomfort is in an anecdote circulating from one character to another and gives his title to the film.It is said that, in a neighboring city, lives an elephant that spends his time sitting in his cage.Nothing makes him leave this sitting position, neither the invectives of his masters nor the food that visitors throw from him.Going to see this stoic elephant becomes the horizon of the film, its salvation, the promise of an elsewhere spatial and temporal and mental.

This vision of the dark side of inner China recalls the recent fiction as much fiction of Dong Yue (2018) as much fiction as much fiction as the documentary cinema of Wang Bing.Even digital aesthetics based on grayish shades, even attraction for duration and even desire to document a reality on the fringes of victorious China.But unlike the archaeologist Wang Bing who likes to knead dead materials, Hu Bo endeavors to transcribe a spleen as close as possible to the present.The strength of the film lies in its ability to create gross present.The four hours of projection almost give the impression of covering the same duration as the day whose film is the narration, as if the time of the film had managed to compress that of the day without any loss of definition, without any emotional stateof his characters escape the camera.This sentimental impressionism is based on a mastery of the sequence plan that brings him closer, this time, his young compatriot bi gan, the dreamlike less.

Because it is not the entry into the dream that limits the film but death.More than disappointment in love, harassment and family discharges, the omnipresence of death and the weapons that cause it (baton, pistol, baseball bat) draws a link between the different trajectories of the film.But this death is always filmed out of champ.It is only visible on the face of those who witness it.Such a staging bias creates an incredible emotional vertigo with regard to the context of reception of the film.An Elephant Sitting Still is this face on which the out-of-champ death of its director is read.We can watch it as we saw another great film on Teen despair, Elephant by Gus Van Sant (2003).Except that the drama whose film is the announcement is overflowing this time from its story.

However, its sublime and bright end diverges from the one that has decided to give itself its author.Cinematographic declination of the flowers of evil, an elephant sitting still is the masterpiece of a young man who did not know how to live with reality, who made this pain a film and who put it whatHe had optimism left.

An Elephant Sitting Still by Hu Bo (Chi., 2018, 3:50 a.m.)