Its a day in a grey and cold border town in China. With always moving camera with long takes, the film closely trails the lives 4 of its citizen's ultra depressing lives. There is a bullied high school boy (Peng Yuchang) with unsympathetic parents, a local gang leader (Zhang Yu) who is out to get the boy after his younger bully brother gets pushed down the stairs and dies, a classmate/love interest (Wang Uvin) of the boy, whose afraid of her affair with vice principal ever being discovered and an old man whose family is passive=aggressively pushing him to go to a retirement home. Suicide of a jilted lover, death of a pet dog, uploaded scandalous video and social media stigma, betrayed friendship, their lives never lets up.
Director/writer Hu Bo portrays these down in luck, relentlessly bleak lives with much empathy and tenderness. Honestly I didn't think I would like An Elephant Sitting Still. But after an hour and a half in, I was drawn to their flight, their impossible, inescapable situations. With very intimate, highly subjective camera and lens work, An Elephant achieves a rare familiarization with the audiences. Its one day in the life of... premise really works to the benefit of its 4 hour running time. There is even Nolan style (but not used as a stupid plot device) time bending with character story lines crossing, overlapping timelines.
It's a substantial human drama with deeply felt characters with their crushed, burdened souls. The idea of using an immobile circus elephant (which never materializes on screen) as a wised out Buddha who silently observes human follies play out around him as some sort of metaphor for happiness/salvation has a direct lineage from that of a whale in Werkmeister Harmonies. It's better off that we don't get to see it. Only hear its roar during its end credit, just like that that donkey's cry in the beginning of Au Hasard Balthazar. The beast of hopes and dreams. The beast of burden. An Elephant Sitting Still is beautifully tragic. And it a major film that came out in recent years that I can recall.
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