An Elephant Sitting Still and Ecology

A three hour and fifty minute film set in a gray industrial mining city somewhere in Northeast China, Bo Hu’s first film (he died before the final cut of the film was released) focuses on the lives of four characters who ultimately share the same horrific space and ecology, similar to what Krzystof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue did in 2000. To highlight both characters and their connection to this eco-disaster, Hu throws in the dynamic use of the long take via Steadicam that PT Anderson displayed in Boogie Nights and deep focus exploitation of space that is clearly influenced by Citizen Kane, sometimes showing us four or five planes of action at the same time. The film’s plot lines ultimately converge, and we and the characters are left in a limbo of a very long take late at night. The possible influence of Robert Altman’s vision jumps out at this end point.

The clearest and most depressing aspect of this film is not the characters’ dilemmas, nor the potential solutions that may unfold (well after the story is completed), but their situation and environment. Each character is having a horrible day. A grandfather is being told by his son and daughter-in-law that they want him to leave his own apartment for a nursing home, so they can have more space, and his beloved dog dies in a very distasteful way. Two high school students find themselves on the run (right out of Rebel Without a Cause). One because he has violently defended a friend who lied to him about stealing a phone, and the other because she was outed on social media for her affair with the high school Vice Dean. All three have miserable home lives.

Added to the mix is a local gangster whose affair with his best friend’s wife leads to her husband’s suicide, right out the bedroom window they just occupied. One could walk away trying to keep this hyper melodramatic set of storylines in some kind of logical order and actually succeeding in doing just that. Bo Hu weaves these lives together in spaces that are more depressing than their personal problems.

From an eco-perspective, this city is also a nightmare: Gray streets, blue gray barely illuminated interiors, endless mining trains pulling across a flat landscape that has been sucked dry by industrialization. The need to run away is dramatically structured by the plot of the film, but escaping this grim landscape would be reason enough. The air is clearly thick with pollution, and living conditions are cramped and soulless. The grandfather’s (a pensioner) trip to the nursing home his family want to stow him is a descent into purgatory. Every time a character turns, their stories get worse—but not as bad as the physical world they inhabit. An Elephant Sitting Still offers only a dark promise of change in a night-time shot outside a bus, and we’re left wondering whether or not the elephant’s cries accompanying our characters’ dimly lit soccer game mean this dire eco-disaster will end. 

Thank you, Joe!