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| Xi Zi, Kong Yixin, Peng Yuchang, and Wang Uvin in An Elephant Sitting Still |
Albert Camus formulated the most familiar tenet of existentialism: "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide." It's a phrase that haunts every moment of Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, and not only because the writer-director chose to resolve the problem by taking his own life after completing his one and only feature film. The irony is that for his film, after depicting the desperate, intersecting lives of four people, Hu chose a different answer to the problem, something more in line with Samuel Beckett's familiar formulation, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." That's the choice made by the young Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) and Huang Ling (Wang Uvin) on the advice of the elderly Wang Jin (Xi Zi), even though the last has already admitted that in his long life he has never found anything different from the existential misery in which they exist. "So I have to sugar-coat it," he says. "There must be a difference." So the three of them, along with Wang Jin's young granddaughter, continue their journey to see the titular elephant, a ponderous symbol of elective inertia, introduced into the film by the gangster Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), telling his girlfriend about "an elephant in Manzhouli. It sits there all day long. Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks. Or maybe it just enjoys sitting there. I don't know." This is a four-hour film that's anything but epic. Hu makes no attempt to enliven it with sensational moments, though it contains violence: two suicides, several other deaths including that of Wang Jin's small dog, and several beatings. But all of them occur just off camera. In perhaps the central event, when Wei Bu shoves the bully tormenting his friend down a flight of stairs, we barely even see the shove, but only hear the muffled sound of the fall, and finally glimpse the bully on the flight below. The bully, who dies in hospital, is Yu Cheng's brother, which serves to link his story with that of Wei Bu, but it's not the only death Yu has witnessed today: Earlier, he has slept with the wife of a friend who, on discovering Yu Cheng in their apartment, jumps off the roof of the building. We don't see that fall either. Instead, the camera lingers throughout the film in extended takes, usually keeping one or more of the characters in close-up. Even when encounters between characters take place, there's none of the usual cross-cutting, and often they enter and even remain out of focus in the background. If this sounds like mannered filmmaking, I'm afraid it often is. And if the existentialist drift of the narrative sounds pretentious, I'm afraid that's also true. And yet, this is a film that can draw you in and hold you in its spell for an unconscionably long time, simply because it's so beautifully assembled, so deft at drawing you into its world, holding you to its characters and their plight.
