[The film of the week] An Elephant Sitting Still, last train for

Like Charles Laughton with The Night of the Hunter, Hu Bo will remain the author of a unique film touching to perfection. For different reasons, however, the 29-year-old Chinese director and writer killed himself after completing post-production of An Elephant Sitting Still, a chronicle of the absolute darkness of contemporary China and the human condition. ...

Like Charles Laughton with The Night of the Hunter, Hu Bo will remain the author of a unique film touching to perfection. For different reasons, however, the 29-year-old Chinese director and writer killed himself after completing post-production of An Elephant Sitting Still, a chronicle of the absolute darkness of contemporary China and the human condition. Based on one of his short stories, the story is set in a post-industrial city in northern China shrouded in perpetual haze with few lines of escape for its inhabitants. At most if, chimerical horizon, circulates the legend of an elephant who would be seated, in silence, in the zoo of Manzhuli, indifferent to the chaos of the world. Consider the mythical thread linking the different characters to which the film will be attached, the (suspended) 24-hour time: dreamy thug sleeping with the wife of a friend who, therefore, throws himself out of the window; teenager on whom weighs a deaf threat since he jostled the caïd of the high school; young girl having an unmentionable affair; old man promised to a sinister hospice - a tracking shot is better than long speeches - by his family. The sample of a world given over to social violence and humiliation, humanity on the back burner. Palette of protagonists in search of meaning that the scenario, labyrinthine and sinuous, will soon work to connect in a movement to which the penumbra enveloping things and beings comes to give a hypnotic turn. And the camera slips, in the fluidity of the sequence shots (Hu Bo is a disciple of Béla Tarr), almost indistinctly from one to the other - as true, moreover, that they are all stuck in the same slump, their comings and goings to ward off the evil of living appearing quite ridiculous... "In our time, it is more and more difficult to have faith even in the smallest thing that there is", wrote Hu Bo in his note of intent, giving the desperate measure of his remarks, in the light of the evolution of today's China, frozen for the moment in a texture that is not without evoking, in places, Black Coal, Thin Ice, by Yi'nan Diao. But if its characters seem destined to remain stranded, at the platform of a train that would not leave, An Elephant Sitting Still also sketches, at the height of its disillusioned resignation, a fragile solidarity. And the night to appear, perhaps, less inhospitable, provided you go and see. Which is also the singular strength of a work summoning up paradoxical feelings, unquestionably one of the most stimulating films released for a long time, combining the breadth of the story with haunting beauty. A masterpiece as dazzling as definitive, to discover absolutely.