An Elephant Sitting Still

It might be slow, but not boring. Plus, when it picks up, it really picks up. It's beautifuly directed and it's hard to take your eyes away from it.

I love the atmosphere of this film. It all feels wierdly familiar. I can feels the cold air. I can smell the environment. The closing scenes in particular I think will evoke an odd sense of nostalgia in a lot of people. The fact that almost every scene is shot in long takes makes it even more immersive.

It can drag quite a bit at times. With a runtine of almost four hours and a pace so slow it would make Andrei Tarkovsky jealous, it was always going to drag, but it never stops being completely entrancing and heartbreaking.

This is a must-watch.

There are several reasons why you will not forget this film if you have had the patience to sit through the 4 hours of its slow running time. One of them will be to wonder if the long film was worth your while.

The director Bo Hu only made this feature film in his entire life before he committed suicide at age 29. The film is based on his book that he wrote under a pen-name. With a book and a feature film to his credit, Bo Hu evidently still felt trapped.

All the characters are innocent but nihilistic to the core caught within China's social "no-win" trap if you are not rich or have political connections. Nietzsche would have smiled at this film. There is no way out. Yet they hope optimistically for a better life. It is a curious film that ends up with stupid violent scenes as some recent award-winning films from China have. Nothing positive to take away here after 4 hours. The concept of the elephant sitting still is possibly positive, which is why four adults want to metaphorically see it. One positive takeaway in the indirect commentary on China today, rarely discussed in the media.

I cannot comprehend how this movie can be so beautifully shot, staged and acted, while on the other hand depicting the ugliest but so true to life experiences a human could ever possibly encounter. Not a single spark of hope ever comes up during the entire film, every character experiences his own version of hell while trying to find meaning in their appently meaningless lifes. Nobody smiles, everyone wears a thick winter coat.. even inside as if they need an extra shell to protect them from other humans. And yet, after four hours you are left with the urge to tell the world that there is still something worth living for. This movie is a plea for more kindness and humanity, although it is almost never showing either of them itself. A movie has never affected me so deeply like this one. I will never forget this experience and I am sorry for the directors relatives.. they, the Chinese Cinema and we all have lost a true filmmaking genius.

Few debuts are this good. Throughout four hours, Hu Bei creates an overwhelminly human and sensitive film, creating characters to which we deeply sympathise and connect with. The more the film moves long, the more impactful it becomes, and soon enough even the smallest actions, the most simple scenes become huge, due to the sheer emotional investment the spectator has. This works mostly for these reasons: Bei's camera, which is always close to the characters, following them in long, some times astonishing shots; the actors, all of them astounding; the long running time, which gives time not just to explore each character, but also for the viewer to just spend time with these people, who we love to care about so deeply. Melancholic but not sad, deeply moving but never sentimental, An Elephant Sitting Still doesn't feel bigger than life: it feels like life, period. To call it a masterpiece would be an understatement.

"An Elephant Sitting Still" is clearly a very personal film, a little too personal perhaps. It's a four-hour cry of anguish from a director who sadly took his own life shortly after the film was completed. No wonder then that the film has such a preoccupation with suicide.

Knowing the film's backstory makes it hard to be critical of it, but if I'm being honest I found my patience greatly tried by this one. It's misery porn at its most miserable, and it simply did not need to be so long. There's no break to the relentless drabness of it, and it's so depressing that it almost teeters into comical. After awhile, when faced with something as downbeat as this, you have no choice but to start finding it absurd that so much misery (including no fewer than three deaths) could possibly land on four interrelated people in the space of one day.

It seems heartless and pointless to criticize "An Elephant Sitting Still" for being undisciplined given the fate of its director, but that's what it is. It's an internal monologue from the perspective of someone who's clearly not well, and it teases us with the heartbreaking potential of its young filmmaker, because formally it's a very impressive movie, but it simply didn't have anything to say to me other than life is a pointless wallow in despair, which is not at all what I believe.

Grade: B