A beautiful barnburner by a budding auteur, gone too soon. The director Hu Bo committed suicide in 2017 soon after finishing filming this and it's difficult to parse that fact from any viewing/reading of An Elephant Sitting Still. Hu Bo's death came under cloudy circumstances allegedly related to conflicts with the producers of the film. He was just 29. This was his first film after writing two novels also released in 2017. We're left with a four-hour cut of a slow and sprawling, tonally bleak story told through the vantage point of several characters dealing with big philosophical problems. Given what little information there is coming out of China about Hu Bo, his life, his art, his process, his death, we're left with pretty much just the 234 minutes here. And while that's a lot, and for many perhaps, too much, it's just a fragment in reality. Consider the fleeting nature of time, be it with lovely long shots captured by handheld cameras set to a post-rock score, or by the real mystery of a suicide by a young, talented person. This films weaves together the fabric of four characters over the course of a single day, and in doing so creates something much larger for us to ponder.
Review of An Elephant Sitting Still
