Kaili Blues

KAILI BLUES: A DEMANDING, STUNNING EXPERIENCE

KAILI BLUES is an extraordinary film….not just a good first feature, not just a good independent Chinese film.…but an imperfect dazzling masterpiece.

Audiences who watch normal films bring strong ideas of what makes effective, satisfying storytelling.…I came expecting another good festival art film from China, yet even as a film director/critic, it took me 45 minutes to suddenly realise and understand what the director was brilliantly achieving with fresh cinematic language and vision. From then on I was mesmerised and deeply moved.

This film doesn't satisfy cinematic art or entertainment preconceptions….It is unique, thrilling personal cinema, that communicates on different conscious and subconscious levels, conceptually, visually, emotionally.

BI GAN, the very young film director/poet in his 20s, is already an honest, open, accomplished artist, with well-deserved self-confidence (ego firmly in-check), dynamic creative ambitions, and skills to accomplish them. I don't want to burden him with this, or sound pretentious and preposterous – but I couldn't help flashing on Orson Welles during "Citizen Kane".

Wang Tianxing's cinematography was stunning, perfectly merging with the dynamic style and viewpoints of the story. No matter how many camera persons were used or their professional experience, everything flowed seamlessly emotionally. The magical 41-minute single moving shot is as revolutionary as Sokurov's landmark "Russian Ark," with greater psychological and emotional resonance. Memory, fantasy, and reality weave through and around each other.

Film crafts and cinema language are used smoothly and very effectively: visually powerful rural locations in Kaili, Guizhou Province, China (used with subtlety and respect), "costumes" (real lived-in clothes), props (from real homes and villages). Production design, sound, and editing are all creatively professional.

The Producers did a remarkable job during pre-production, shooting, and post-production, because there must have been daily stressful problems to overcome.

The actors – 99% non-professional - are perfectly cast and directed. Chen Yongzhong's memorable presence holds together all the wonderful characters in the 110-minute film.

Traditional Chinese, Miao, children's song, local band, actor's song, new music, and terrific end credit duet, are all evocative and touching.

KAILI BLUES should be seen at least two times, and discussed by film students in every international serious film school, and by audiences who are passionate about cinema in all countries within and outside China.

(Since this is a glowing review, I must say that I have absolutely no connection with the film or anyone who made it.)

I was recommended to watch this film by a very good friend of mine who has the similar tastes on movies and literature and other kinds of art. He recommended me to see the short film Jingang Jing by Gan Bi. Yes, the short is good too, and has some kind of connection with Lu bian ye can. Back to the movie, it is the way he talk the story and shoot the film which makes me surprise and enjoy. When graduated from film Academy, Gan Bi became a video guy for weddings, and thanks to the wedding films experiences, he used the skills to this movie and the long dizzy shot brought me the climax of wander and fly. As a young director, this movie is a little immature to me, and to be honest, I enjoy this feeling.

Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan's awards-winning debut, KAILI BLUES, in fact, the literal translation of its Chinese title is "roadside picnic", which appears to be the name of a frayed paperback collection of poems we can glance in one scene relatively near the beginning, and indeed poem suffuses in Bi's oneiric idiom, told through the voice-over of our protagonist Chen Shen (Chen Yongzhong).

The opening shot is a nearly 360-degree roving take setting against in a fixed position, a sparse clinic where Chen works with an elderly doctor (Zhao), they live in Kaili, a foggy, soggy, slight crummy town in China's southeast, subtropical Guizhou province. In lieu of plying audience with Chen's backstory, Bi cogently puts beauty derived from quotidian scenery in a salient place where a laconic storyline takes its form most subtly, the place where a young boy Weiwei (Luo) and his father Crazy Face (Xie) lives is decrepit and noisy to a fault, but strikingly there is a cascade just in vicinity, which promptly gives the said place an almost surreal grandeur, also Bi manifests his ingenuity by capturing the reflection of a passing train on the wall, a blunt intrusion brutally shattering the homely equilibrium but who can deny its aesthetic signification, plus, a passing train would later give the film's ending a divine "turning-back-time" coup-de-maître.

Soon it transpires that Chen is an ex-convict, and Crazy Face is his brother, but there is bad blood between them (which always has to do with family inheritance, properties in particular), Chen notices that Crazy Face is a deliberately negligent parent and suspects that he is going to sell Weiwei. So when Weiwei is sent away to Monk (Yang), a former gangster ringleader Chen once worked for and for whom he is locked behind the bars, he embarks on an excursion to look for his nephew Zhenyuan, and concurrently, to locate his colleague's old flame, who has Miao pedigree and now falls gravely ill.

The magic occurs when he reaches a town called Dang Mai, where Bi employs an audacious long take running over 40 minutes following Chen and other people he meets there, in particular, a local girl Yangyang (Guo), who is going to work as a tourist guide in Kaili and a young man also named Weiwei (Yu) who overtly carries a torch for her but she seems not to reciprocate. When reality, past, dream are entwined in that bucolic loop, Bi even risks betraying the camera's own existence in order to achieve this cinematic wizardry, is this Weiwei is a future version of Chen's nephew? Does the hairdresser (Liu) he meets is a reincarnation of his deceased wife? When Chen wears the shirt which is delivered to his colleague's Miao lover, is he reliving an imaginative past to give away the cassette, the pledge of romance and courtship? There are cues and incongruities, but the whole enterprise is so remarkably done that should it be singled out as an absolute high water mark from a tenderfoot in the sphere of filmmaking.

Taking the mantle from Chinese indie trailblazers (Jia Zhangke is the obvious object of reference), Bi Gan has a particular knack of marshaling amateur cast and sampling everyday settings to evince a strangely, but also affectingly enigmatic quality bordering on an amalgam of warmth, other-worldliness and allure, converging with its poetic undertow, kismet-galvanized mythos, beguiling scenery shots, peculiar camera composition and astonishing visual fluidity, plus other perverse quirks: the movie's title materializes roughly 30 minutes into its duration, and its opening credits are read out loud which harks back to Pasolini's THE HAWK AND THE SPARROW (1966, 7.5/10) where the credits are given a singsong treatment, KAILI BLUES is the whole package for art cinephiles, and more encouragingly, Bi Gan is very possible, "the" most electrifying discoveries of recent Chinese cinema.

Your mileage may vary depending on which direction the trains and time are flowing. Curious to see bi-lingual Mandarin/English reviews, I tried to pause on the poems voiced over during the film, but too often they washed over me like the constant flow of water through-out.

The film is both heavy on symbolism, as well as strongly rooted on the earth, specifically the territory in the Guizhou Province, which apparently looks both rustic and post-industrial. Another review mentioned vehicles that fail that is a good metaphor for the film, but the viewer does travel with this film, if not where one might expect.

I am curious if the language ends up being a bigger tipping point to what is at play here. The blurring of characters/time perhaps indicated by key phrases or tenses. Or even in tense phrases, the scene in the make-shift salon where our Dr. Hero gets his haircut felt unsettling in an interesting way. And I wasn't even the woman giving the good Dr. his trim.

Besides the much discussed long single shot, so much fascinating tracking done (presumably by quite and highly reliable motorcycles) and great projected images at times.

Again I remain curious if this feels foreign to even folks familiar with the physical, if not emotional territory covered. I look forward to more films from Gan Bi after this auspicious beginning.

+++Chen is a doctor-he has a irresponsible brother who mistreats his son. As the movie progresses snippets of information about his previous life are dropped, almost casually, either through dialogue or flashbacks. Indeed, one theme is the temporal intermixture.

It's interesting for me to have insights into Chinese modern lifestyle shown directly through the street life (The Iron Ministry, Blind Shaft). Hence we see people going along with their business, poor people or desolated ones. Also, we see superstition, tedium, old traditions, appliances that don't work and vain attempts to fix them.

The second part is almost a different film. We leave the city, often grim, with glum buildings and we enter a mostly enchanting mountain area. As a reviewer mentioned we have a long shot as in Russian's Ark by Sokurov. Perhaps this technique is associated with filming in a way also seen in music videos: several young people, the same ones, continuously pop out and into the scene. The twirling sequence culminates by Chen revealing last piece of the story of his life to a hairdresser.

Now, the director pulls out an interesting feat. People borrow to each other moments of their lives and some people substitute for others. It is like being in a dream, which is constructed subtly and as if without strain. Examples: the flashlight story of Chen's coworker reappears in the story he tells to hairdresser; the latter is a substitute for Chen's ex-wife; the nephew is substituted by a motorcycle driver he meets who has the same name, draws watches, has a watch painted on his wrist, is bullied and to whom Chen offers protection-all these exactly like with his child nephew. Even more, two casually introduced persons share same nickname, Idiot.

And yes we share some more themes, more common in Chinese movies: lost love, responsibility toward family, choices to correct fatalities that lead to more tragedy.

---The camera filming the long shot has several failures, such as jerking or lack of focus. I can't say the movie is a masterpiece and it feels the debuting director wanted to express too much. But he made a compelling, interesting feature.