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I've seen lots of presentations by businesspeople and academics about Chinese industry, development, social problems, politics, progress, environmental disasters, etc. etc. I've never seen anything like this. It's China on the ground - actually a town about to be submerged by the Three Gorgest Dam project. The title translation of "Three Gorges Good People" is right - these are ordinary folks who endure, persist, help each other out, etc. in a mixed landscape of natural beauty, building, poverty, and destruction that has to be seen to be understood. The story of the dam shapes everybody's life without actually determining or washing them out. Definitely try to see this if you have any interest at all in China today.

The comment which was written before mine gives a great and brilliant explanation of the social problems and facts that involves this film, so I am not going to repeat it. I prefer to talk about another one of the most relevant aspects of this movie: the photography, magisterially directed by Yu Likwai. Sometimes one can have the impression to be watching a photo album, further than a movie. There are no bad or ugly photo-grams in this film. Every image contains a really fine sense of photography as an art, including superb landscapes, exiting colors, and intelligent compositions with everything and everybody in the right place, without unaesthetic gaps. A pleasure for eyes and soul.

Known previously as a documentary, and not as a romance, "Sanxia Haoren" ("Still Life") was the surprise — and last — film in Venice Festival (Italy) and not even the first one film of the young maker (he already had another movie in competition). Mr Jia shows us China just as it is nowadays. Not the power of huge works, or the beautiful scenery, just as the Dam on the Yangsi River nearby, but simple Chinese people, with simple problems, that do not know nothing such happiness (yet). It's heartbreaking, it's wonderfully filmed, it's like a superb painting. A simple masterpiece (and not only a Golden Lion). The surprise at Venice's Mostra. Catherine Deneuve, the French president of the jury of Venice, was very moved by Jia's work, the story told and the emotion of that film.

China's sixth generation director Jia Zhang-ke's recent Golden Lion winner at Venice is slightly more accessible to the general audience than his previous work, although Shijie (2004) has been heading generally towards that direction. Unlike Xiao Wu (1997), which is completely devoid of story or plot, Still Life at least has a story (in fact two) of sorts but, to Jia credit, stays away from the conventional Hollywood melodrama formula. The last thing we need is another Hollywood-look-alike movie made by a Chinese director who gives up what he is good at to impersonate a Hollywood director. There are already too many.

The story of the Three Gorges Dam begs to be told. Jia tells it from a micro, personal angle, by weaving two separate stories together, with the Three Gorges Dam project not just as a backdrop, but also as a subject of enquiry. In polarized contrast to the gorgeous tourism posters, Jia's camera shows the devastation along the Gorges in a way that almost reminds you of the ruins in Polanski's "The pianist". In the two unrelated stories, two people arrive in the same riverside town, a nurse looking for her husband who seems to have lost interest in her, and a coalminer searching for his wife who left him, taking with her their daughter.

These stories are told in Jia's usual minimalist style, but with pain sticking attention to details. Instead of the dialogue, it's the nuances, the body language, and even the framing of the shot that reveals. New to Jia's screen are moments of playful, surprising touches as if the director is saying "Hey, I can handle surreal too". The appropriate use of pop music from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Mainland of China adds to the dimension and depth of the film.

True to his tradition, Jia films the life of ordinary people just as it is. The coalminer in Still Life is one in real life, and a relative of Jia. He even uses his real name Han San-ming. True to his tradition again, Jia uses only one professional actor, Zhao Tao, but she is so good that you can't tell her apart from the rest of the "cast" in terms of being an authentic, ordinary person that Jia might have just picked from a crowd in the street.

I miss Jia's earlier work such a Xiao Wu, for its uniqueness and detached, realistic depiction of lives of real people. On the other hand, I don't mind his introduction of conventional "entertaining" elements, so long as he stops before, way before, succumbing to the senseless scramble of the Chinese 5th generation directors to capture the Hollywood market. Many a soul has been sold for fame and fortune.

Though perhaps 'Still Life'/'Sanxia haoren' (the Variety reviewer thought so) is primarily for the Jia devotee or the festival-goer (it's already been awarded the Golden Lion at Venice) and certainly it's totally noncommercial, it's a lovely, hypnotic piece of work, another haunting picture of the vast creation, disruption, destruction that is modern China from that country's most exciting and original younger-generation filmmaker.

There are layers of irony in the title, because in the incredibly turbulent, ceaselessly active events on screen in this world of life that is anything but "still," the most amazing images slip by without comment. A construction boss on a rampart one evening cell-phones a technician and says, "The VIP's are here. Why aren't the lights on? I'll count to three; then turn on. One, two, three. . ." and a huge bridge and arch are suddenly illuminated behind him. One of the two estranged couples the film follows to tentative reunions is talking with a vast city behind them and in the background a big skyscraper suddenly, silently collapses. There is no comment. It just miraculously happens. In the final shot, amid the debris of the Three Gorges where the world's largest dam will eventually displace 1.4 million people, Han Sanming (non-actor Han Sanming's actual name), a mine worker who's come to find his wife and daughter, who left him sixteen years ago, stands looking out at the urban landscape and a trapeze artist is quietly walking across a tightrope between tall buildings. Again, no comment.

Han Sanming can't find his wife right away and her brother doesn't trust him at first, so he stays for months, working with the brother in demolition. A perky young fellow, who quotes John Wu star Chow Yun Fat and imitates Hong Kong gangster gestures, befriends Han Sanming and they put each other's numbers in their cell phones--a contemporary pledge of solidarity that has a sad sequel later. The young fellow, who could easily have been one of the lost, hopeful young men in Jia's 2002 Unknown Pleasures, is lost in a demolition accident and gets a sea burial like the one accorded to Johnny Depp's character in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

Focused on the displacement of people for a vast industrial and engineering project, Still Life also contrasts classes--the humble working-class stiff who can make 50 yuan a day pulling down walls or 200 going down in a coal mine not knowing if he'll come back out, versus the handsome lady, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) whose estranged building magnate husband she wants to divorce because she's found a younger man. She has options; Han Sanming is simply drifting and lonely. And in the background for both, though, is the enormous turbulence and activity in which we see both protagonists as tiny helpless figures, their own lives indeed "still life" by comparison.

There's another unexpected, astonishing sequence of a fat rock singer, naked from the waist up like most of the Three Gorges demolition workers Han Sanming encounters and drenched in sweat. He sings of nostalgia for his youth, a time when everybody was happy , and old men in the audience shed tears while garish go-go girls gyrate: where does this fit in? This is another symbol of social upheaval. But what is really happening? Won't Chinese society have to return to its heritage of Mao and the Eighties aftermath chronicled in another of Jia's unwieldy masterpieces, the 2000 Platform? Perhaps the titles Still Life ironically points to the way people are frozen in isolation (broken couples, estranged children) and unhappiness (or quiet desperation) in a China that all the rampant economic progress both masks and perpetuates.

After his colorful land pointed but somewhat leaden 2004 The World/Shijie Jia Zhang-Ke has shown again as in Platform and Unknown Pleasures that he can touch and astonish. The human events are dwarfed by capitalist Progress in the new China, but people (after all, they are a zillion of them there) are still very much in the foreground. \Still Life is an impressive, organic-feeling movie that refers to Jia's earlier films but, extraordinarily, seems to bring together both post-war Italian neo-realism and the desolate urban landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni.

Seen in Paris, October 21, 2007 at the MK2 Hautefeuille.