Chinese director Jia Zhangke's Still Life illustrates the parallel lives of two Chinese couples, set against the dramatic and spectacular backdrop of China's Three Gorges. Within these two individual stories Zhang explores Chinese society and interpersonal relationships, including the roles of liquor, tea, cigarettes and sweets in fostering communication between people. Much of the subject matter is based around emotions that anyone familiar with Chinese society understands, but are very difficult to verbally articulate. The resulting work is a surreal narrative of individual lives, an examination of Chinese culture, the themes of friendship and loyalty and the phenomena of a nation's meteoric rise to modernity. Zhang successfully integrates these diverse themes into an ethereal, flowing vision that constantly bends time and space, regularly confounding the audience's expectations. The film has an otherworldly, unbelievable quality, indicative of the monumental changes to daily life in contemporary China.

    By shooting this film with HD video, Zhang is able to capture images quickly and flexibly without extensive preparation. Without this ability to work flexibly and quickly, utilizing the backdrop of a rapidly disappearing city would have been impossible. The digital medium also allows Jia to subtly manipulate and enhance the color palette of the film, contributing to the dreamlike quality of many scenes. This effect is further enhanced by the breathtaking background landscapes. Mountains and water symbolize the subject matter of traditional Chinese landscape painting. The devastated architectural shell of Fengjie, Sichuan simutaneously resonates the historical portrayal of karst mountains in Chinese painting, and the impermanence of everything material in modern China. HD video also allows the insertion of surprising and unexpected special effects like flying saucers and odd buildings blasting off into space.

    Fengjie, Sichuan, a river town with two thousand years of documented history, immortalized by Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai, is systematically obliterated and then submerged beneath the waters of the Yangtze, all within a two- year period. The film's two main protagonists, played by Zhao Tao and Han Sanming have both come to Fengjie in search of lost love and resolution in their personal lives, but these two individuals occupy very different stations in contemporary Chinese society. Shen Hong symbolizes China's modern middle class, while Han Sanming represents the tradition bound and obligation minded rural laborer, whose muscles and sacrifice have built modern China.

    When Han is riding on the ferry to Fengjie he witnesses a magic show where the magician turns Chinese renminbi into foreign currency. Unmoved, and appearing completely unaware of current events and China's integration into the world economy, Han is later harassed and shook down by the magic show's proprietor. When the man rifles the contents of Han's bag, Han calmly pulls a switchblade. An unruffled Han quickly gets his belongings returned and lets the viewer know there is more strength, depth and intelligence to his character than is conveyed by his humble appearance. While Han owns a mobile phone, it seems he has made no other concessions to modernity. Despite having been abandoned by his wife sixteen years earlier, he has arrived in Fengjie determined to find her, and the daughter he has never met.

    Shen Hong has come to Fengjie in search of her husband, a factory worker who she has not heard from in more than a year. Unlike Han, who hopes to reunite with his family, Shen has come to ask her husband for a divorce. In the China of twenty years ago, the very idea of a woman traveling alone to find her husband to inform him she is leaving would have been unimaginable. Arriving at the factory, she witnesses an argument between the factory manager and a worker disabled by an accident. Sold to a wealthy outside investor, the employees who have given their life's work to the factory are left with nothing, including their pensions. Small vignettes featuring different problems of contemporary Chinese life are sprinkled throughout the film. Shen is escorted to her husband's locker. After smashing the rusted lock, the locker's contents are revealed like a dusty, state- owned time capsule, a static moment frozen against the destruction and seismic changes taking place outside the factory's walls.

    The obliteration of Fengjie is accomplished by hundreds of laborers wielding sledgehammers. We feel the irony of manual laborers annihilating evidence of the past one blow at a time, in order to make way for a 21st century engineering marvel. The inclusion of a western Han Dynasty archeological site being carefully excavated, which suddenly cuts to a propaganda film where the "Bureau of Education" is imploding from an explosion, communicates the tenuous position of history and culture in contemporary China. The viewer is left with an impression of impermanence and constant flux.

    Han Sanming, the film's chief protagonist, is labeled a sentimentalist. In fact, Han is a hard working, straightforward traditionalist who symbolizes the power and tenacity of China's grassroots rural population. Like hundreds of millions of other migrant workers across China, he is laboring to improve his lot and regain what he has lost. During a scene where he sits eating with Brother Mark, recounting the story of what brings him to Fengjie, the camera slowly pans across to the next table. We find Guan Yu, Liu Bei and Zhang Fei, the heroic brotherhood from Romance of the Three Kingdoms and historic paragons of virtue and loyalty, sitting apathetically, playing hand held video games. The theme of brotherhood is echoed in a touching, melancholy scene in the boarding house, where Han drinks shots with his co-workers, talking about their ancestral homes and work. Initially excited to hear about the high wages paid to coal miners in Shanxi, the other men make a vow between rounds to find Han when they have finished their demolition project. After Han warns them that coal mining is life- threatening work, with the spectre of death ever- present, the room falls silent. Yet, the next day we find all the men, their few possessions on shoulder borne poles, following Han Sanming out of Fengjie and north to the mines. An imaginary tightrope walker walks between abandoned, dilapidated buildings on the horizon, an allusion to the precarious lives of all these men, forced to risk their lives for higher wages, because they see no alternative. They must support families in their ancestral villages who need to eat, and children who must pay school fees and buy clothes.

    Still Life leaves us with a vision that is unresolved. Within the microcosm of Fengjie we witness one world rapidly disappearing, and a new one not yet fully formed. Between these two extremes we have a cast of characters occupying different strata in Chinese society, yet all subject to the vagaries resulting from the ongoing monumental changes wrought by China's light speed development. In interviews, director Jia Zhangke concedes that no one can intellectually resolve the speed and momentum that are catapulting China into the future, and shaping her destiny. What one can do is bear witness to an amazing and often problematic transformation, and that is what Jia has done so brilliantly with this film.