NYT reviews Still Life

承前*1

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/movies/18stil.html?8dpc


賈樟柯の『三峡好人(Still Life)』がレヴューされている。目を惹くのは、ミケランジェロ・アントニオーニ*2ロベルト・ロッセリーニの影響の影響を指摘しているところか;


Antonioni’s influence on Mr. Jia is pronounced, evident in the younger filmmaker’s manipulation of real time and the ways he expresses his ideas with images rather than through dialogue and narrative. The drifting, rootless men and women in many of his movies, and the wide-open, nominally empty landscapes through which they on occasion wander, further underscore the resemblances between the filmmakers. Even so, when Mr. Jia’s characters roam through the crumbling town in “Still Life” — which is being demolished in anticipation of an engineered inundation — it’s impossible not to think even further back in cinema history to Rossellini’s postwar films, like “Paisan” and “Germany Year Zero,” works in which the director’s moral position is etched into every human face and fallen building.

Like Rossellini, Mr. Jia has found a great subject in his rapidly changing country and its people, who seem to be casualties of a different, more elusive war. The two principal characters in “Still Life,” Sanming (Han Sanming) and Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), land in Fengjie separately and never actually meet, bound only by a shared desire to find their errant spouses. Sanming, a fireplug whose muscular arms and back owe something to his time toiling in one of the country’s coal mines, arrives in Fengjie hoping to find his runaway wife and the 16-year-old daughter he has never met. For her part, the willowy, more overtly middle-class Shen Hong, a nurse, is searching for the husband who stopped coming home two years earlier.