Kaili Blues

A "hangout movie" but you're not sure if you really want to be there (or anywhere). There are boogeymen sprinkled throughout Bi Gan's debut feature film that are never seen: hairy "wild men" who live in the forests, gangs who do violent things like cut off people's hands before burying them alive. But it's the evils in plain sight (isolation, sadness, aging) that we really need to watch out for. At times, the film's slowness feels forced, and it's constant allusions to clocks/time kind of beat that metaphor to a pulp. But it's none the less a solid first feature from a budding Chinese director.

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.

The set up for this film is long and not particularly interesting. The protagonist often narrates poetry that I didn't care for, and everything before the long tracking-shot felt boring and not anywhere near as compelling as the film that the director, Bi Gan, would go on to direct (Long Day's Journey into Night).

But everything from that long tracking-shot up to and including the ending (what a final shot!) is something unlike anything I've ever experienced before in film. Like a future or long-past memory being made and enacted in real-time.

We follow a handful of characters as they move about a small town in rural China, the camera switching seamlessly between them in an act of mesmerizing cinematography, no matter how they are travelling or however relevant they may seem to be to the mediocre plot. As this happens, we begin to familiarize ourselves with the location almost to the point that we could map it out, if we had to. You start to feel as though this town is a place you have actually (but only briefly) visited as a tourist who will go on to look back on the time spent there with bittersweet nostalgia. The people, the place. All of it. It has a personality of its own, but calls upon some of your own memories of places and people you remember well, but don't truly know all that well. Just as a tourist would remember but not know the people and places from his transient experiences with them.

Never have I felt so much of a connection to a location in a film, to the point where it practically feels like a real-life experience of my own.

All this might sound very wanky, which is something I was going to accuse the film of being until it reached this part of the film. It won't be the kind of movie that everyone will enjoy, and I'm not even sure I can recommend it.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the film's overall message. And I'm not even quite sure I want to, as it may take away from my very personal journey that it took me on. I probably won't even re-watch this film. Just as you can't relive memories so vividly. That said, just like Bi Gan's more recent film (Long Day's Journey into Night), it clearly plays around with the ideas of memory and dreams. Though I think Kaili Blues is more of a challenge to understand, with all the wanky poetry, cultural differences and references to "wild-men" urban legends.

Some great films can be ruined by a scene, whereas other films such as this, could be elevated from mediocrity to something fresh, exciting and beyond words.

Overall, Long Day's Journey into Night is a far better structured film, with a much more interesting protagonist and plot, but the flawed masterpiece of Kaili Blues manages to achieve something far more significant in its last 55 minutes (that goes by as quickly as a memory of a dream), than most films can hope to achieve in their entirety.

Bi Gan is a director worth the attention.

Kaili Blues - 8/10. Long Day's Journey into Night - 7/10.

This is one of the most beautifully shot films I've ever seen.

I ended up going alone for Kaili Blues for a 10 PM screening at the Mumbai Film Festival 2015. In accordance with standard procedure, I entered the cinema hall baked and ready to enjoy what my cousin described the night before as simply mesmerizing. At first, the theme of the film is familiar. It is essentially a mission to rescue someone (Weiwei) whom the protagonist (Chen) loves. As the film progresses, it takes on an increasingly surrealistic tone, almost losing its way from reality into the imagination of Chen as he travels the hills of China in search of his beloved nephew. The highlight of Kaili Blues is its cinematography. But there is a directorial element that I absolutely adored; the extended shots! Almost reminiscent of Birdman or a Tarantino film, the camera effortlessly follows our hero on bike, foot and boat uninterrupted, as he experiences his past, present and future. I wish this film all the best and hope it releases in a cinema near you!