“An Elephant Sitting Still”

An Elephant Sitting Still (大象席地而坐 ) is an intensely compelling ensemble story despite its four-hour running time; considerable editing could have tightened it into a brilliant film.  

Poster: “Great Circus in Manzhouli”—“Sitting Elephant”

The title refers to the story’s myth, which is that in Manzhouli there is an elephant that sits still by itself taking no notice of people looking at it, feeding it, even abusing it. Manzhouli is a border town in Inner Mongolia more than 1200 miles from where the film is set. The myth links a boy who dreams of seeing the elephant, the girl he told about it, and an elderly upstairs neighbor who served there as a soldier.

City station: Huang Ling (Uvin Wang), Wei Bu (Yuchang Peng), Wang Jin (Zi Xi) and granddaughter (Yichin Kong) in Bo Hu’s “An Elephant Sitting Still”.

We witness an unusual day in an urban neighborhood of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, about 170 miles southeast of Beijing. The neighborhood is in transition. What once may have been socialized housing and schooling for middle class white-collar workers and their families is long past its day. The residents have been ghettoized, fenced in by the country’s energetic urban renewal efforts and free enterprise, left behind to pile up like trash.

Those left behind: A woman (Ning Wang) and her daughter Ling (Uvin Wang).

A cascade of personal mishaps selects a group of these residents: a gangster whose father owns a car dealership and whose younger brother who is a high school bully, several high school kids and their parents, and a retired widower with a small dog, against the backdrop of a pessimistic chorus. As though shot in documentary style with a single camera, the limited depth of field tends to isolate subjects in focus in solitary worlds.

After the story premise, Yu Cheng (Yu Zhang), the gangster, tries to sweet-talk a woman who wants him out of her apartment. He is there because his girlfriend refused him sex. A knock at the door is the woman’s estranged boyfriend, one of Cheng’s henchmen. He enters the apartment and sees Cheng hiding in the shower. A split second later he jumps from the window to his death in the street below.

Different daydreams: Ling (Uvin Wang) and Bu (Yuchang Peng) at high school.

Wei Bu (Yuchang Peng) lives with his father, a nasty disabled and disgraced former policeman, and his long-suffering mother who sells used clothes. He likes Huang Ling (Uvin Wang), a girl in his high school class who has a contentious relationship with her single mother. Ling acts cool toward Bu; she likes him but plays at being “grown up” by secretly spending time with their high school assistant dean.

Wang Jin (Zi Xi) and his best friend.

Upstairs is Wang Jin (Zi Xi) whose daughter and son-in-law have moved into his apartment, putting him and his dog on its enclosed porch. It is convenient and economical for them and their five-year-old daughter to be there, they tell him, reasoning that living alone he doesn’t need more space than the porch; he would be even happier in a retirement home. But Jin keeps his dog because old folks’ homes do not allow them—and his granddaughter loves it.

The school bully Yu Shuai (Xiaolong Zhang) accuses Bu’s friend Li Kai (Zhenghui Ling) of stealing the bully’s cellphone. In a confrontation with Shuai and his “gang” on a school stairway, Bu sticks up for Kai but Shuai ends up at the bottom of the stairwell. Shuai’s older brother Cheng, the gangster, then has to sort out what to do about Bu in addition to what to think about the guy who jumped from the window and how to handle that man’s mother, and later that day his own mother after Shuai dies. He is also on the outs with both girlfriends.

Bu is on the run after the school incident. A large runaway dog attacks and kills Jin’s dog in front of him in an alley which, apart from the personal loss, opens the door to the old folks’ home. Ling leaves home after a final showdown with her mother amid fallout of the disclosure of her “affair” with the school administrator on social media.

The story switches back across issues of personal agency and responsibility, to act or to watch, justice, fate, and the impossibility of action yet the imperative of making new starts. Steeped in an atmosphere of nobody’s-fool pessimism, Bu, perhaps because of his age, honesty, and limited options, is sustained by an inner clarity and this inspires others who can feel it.

In a key moment, Cheng confronts Bu with the question preying on his mind since his friend jumped from the window: “If you are standing on a tall building’s balcony, what thought would cross your mind?” Bu replies honestly: “I would think, what else can I do?”

An Elephant Sitting Still (大象席地而坐—Da xiang xi di er zuo) 2018 China (230 minutes) Dongchun Films. Written, edited, and directed by Bo Hu; cinematography by Chao Fan; production design by Lijian Xie; composed by Hua Lun; produced by Dongyan Fu.

Fig leaf: Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag

Steven Soderbergh’s “BlackBag” (2025) is too clever by two-and-a-half, to the point of aggressively wised-up. The protagonist [we think] George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) are senior British intelligence civil servants whose marriage is as much a cipher as the work they do. 

“Black bag” is a term of art the film uses for information that must not be disclosed to those not cleared to a particular level of secure access. In a world that compartmentalizes secret information to reduce risk of disclosure, only those cleared for access to specific compartments are privileged to share that information. In this instance husband and wife, although senior functionaries for the same outfit, have different jobs with different access, allowing wife the laissez-passer to zip in and out of dark areas under the single laconic cover “black bag”. 

The issue is that a British intelligence insider has sold to a maverick Russian general a flash drive storing a ridiculously-sophisticated CIA-contrived software virus which, locally installed, will cause a nuclear power reactor to meltdown. Woodhouse, warned at outset of the breach, must find the rogue among an assortment of colleagues and recover or destroy the flash drive. 

Writer David Koepp’s set-piece follows old-fashioned class-forward British whodunits, though here detective-steered dinners stand in for drawing room ensembles, perhaps because Brits learned to cook in the intervening years. 

St. Jean is on a suspects shortlist which includes colleagues of various race and circumstance (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page, with Pierce Brosnan as agency head) who provide the character blemishes, substance issues, and sexual peccadillos which attach to intelligence professionals in modern tales of intrigue if these are not simply occupational hazards. 

That said, the measure here is cool. Where in The Old Days certain characters were marked by class distinctions which placed them above other characters and general audiences, the distinguishing marker here is the extent to which they are wised-up. In the spirit of our times, selves are served before King and Country. And it is the coolest cucumber in the icebox who makes tzatziki of the least cool. 

Black Bag 2025 U.S. (93 minutes) Focus Features. Directed by Steven Soderbergh; screenplay by David Koepp; cinematography by Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews); editing by Soderbergh; production design by Philip Messina; casting by Carmen Cuba; music by David Holmes; produced by Casey Silver and Greg Jacobs.

Lee: Showing the unseen

Ellen Kuras’s “Lee” with Kate Winslet as World War II war correspondent-photographer Lee Miller is an impressive bio-pic with a twist. The film’s narrative is framed by an “interview” with a man who turns out to be Miller’s son Antony Penrose (Josh O’Connor) on whose 1985 biography “The Lives of Lee Miller” the film is based. 

 

Billed as a “fashion model turned war correspondent”, Miller is much more interesting than that. Kuras and Winslet show this in details on point for today: Denied access in certain instances for being a “woman”, Miller finds and shoots even better subjects at hand, such as women’s diaphanous underwear drying in an Women’s Royal Air Force barracks window and a woman pilot. Though some scenes make references to Miller’s best known work, Kuras and Winslet do not mimic a masterful image-maker’s life in pictures; rather, they reimagine what the mind behind those pictures was like and lead a conversation on their intriguing, multi-faceted subject. This conversation makes the story.

Voguing in London: Editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) considers hiring photographer Lee Miller (Kate Winslett) in Ellen Kuras’s “Lee”.

Miller’s immediate setting is London’s Vogue magazine for which she modeled, subsequently became a photographer, and ultimately shot her war photography, with editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) and Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barrett in a precious comic turn). And though a formative part of Miller’s intellectual development had been among international intellectual circles in 1930s Paris (her day job at Vogue funded her experiments with Man Ray in surrealism), her story is not told using famous male artists and their careers and work as reference points. Nor does the music swell to “validate” and underline didactic affirmation. Miller did all her modeling with Vogue in the 1920s. This is a story about one person’s life.

Petit déjeuner sur l’herbe de Midi: the French artistic upper crust time-out before the war.

As part of this life, Man Ray (Seán Duggan), an important artistic collaborator for whom Miller has been said to be a “muse”, and Pablo Picasso (Enrique Arce) turn up among others. The poet Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe) and his wife Nusch (Noémie Merlant), French Vogue editor Solange D’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) also make appearances, all disporting al fresco on the French Riviera where Miller meets her future husband, the British artist, art historian, and collector Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård). The group are incredulous that a blustering buffoon could appear to inspire such mass reverence and a following in Germany and elsewhere.

Looking for the war: Life’s David Scherman (Andy Samberg) and Vogue’s Lee Miller (Kate Winslett) patrol for shots in World War II Normandy in Ellen Kuras’s “Lee”.

The audience can see where this story is going. When it gets there, and having a taste of war from shooting for Vogue in London during the Blitz, Miller packs her bags to do her part on the front. She must sign on with American forces to do so: despite keeping calm and carrying on under the steady Nazi aerial bombardment of London, British authorities would not send women correspondents into [other] combat zones. Working with U.S. press colleague David Scherman (Andy Samberg) from after the Allied Normandy invasion to the Liberation of Paris, through the smoking remains of Hitler’s Germany and his death camps to his apartment in Munich, Miller realizes that “there are different kinds of wounds. Not just the ones you can see.”

Springtime for Hitler: The genuine article—Lee Miller (by David Scherman)—and her later-day stand-in Kate Winslet (by Ellen Kuras) wash off war grime in Hitler’s Munich apartment, April 1945.

Lee 2023 U.K. (157 minutes) 55 Films/Brouhaha Entertainment/Hantz Motion Pictures/Sky/Roadside Attractions. Directed by Ellen Kuras; screenplay by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume, and John Collee, based on the 1985 Antony Penrose biography “The Lives of Lee Miller”; cinematography by Pawel Edelman; editing by Mikkel E. J. Nielsen; production design by Gemma Jackson; casting by Lucy Bevan, Olivia Grant; music by Alexandre Desplat; produced by Kate Winslet, Lauren Hantz, Marie Savare, Kate Solomon, Troy Lum, and Andrew Mason.

Speed and nakedness

Vladimir Bortko’s Master i Margarita (2005) is a series timely for this Lent and Holy Week in that it nods unknowingly to Palestine then and now, Aleksei Navalny and Russia’s “secret police”, and Satan and his minions practicing black magic as political rally.

This ten-part television series is promiscuously faithful to Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic Soviet-era novel from which it was adapted, braiding four main narrative strands: one among Soviet writers in Moscow on the eve of Josef Stalin’s Great Purges, connected with a second in which a Soviet Everyman finds his feet in Stalin’s Russia; the third a love story in which a muse-inspired novelist imagines the relationship between a certain Yeshua Ga-Notsri and Pontius Pilate; and a fourth in which Satan and his entourage visit Soviet Russia to assay the mettle of New Soviet Man—Mister Twister as cyclone.

The production is notable for Igor Kornelyuk’s musical score reimagining the Russian romantics, inflected with sacred and traditional music; for Nadezhda Vasileva’s costumes, impeccable, odd-fitting confections from contemporary photographs; and Marina Nikolaeva and Vladimir Svetozarov’s production design along with Yevgeny Krasilnikov and Marina Zubkova’s set decoration, notably revisiting the urban Soviet obsession over living space in a society in which severely limited available housing was rationed: from each regardless of his circumstances to each according to his pull. The English subtitles are generally adequate if Delphic on occasion. 

Никогда не разговаривайте с неизвестными—“Never talk with strangers.”

“Never Talk with Strangers” is the novel’s famous opening: in a Moscow park, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Berlioz (Aleksandr Adabashyan), a somewhat silly, self-important literary bureaucrat, and Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny (Vladislav Galkin), a poet celebrated for a hack screed disparaging Jesus, discuss with a mysterious stranger who calls himself “Woland with a W” (Oleg Basilashvili)—the Russian language has no “W” (a German name which nods to Goethe’s “Faust”)—whether Jesus Christ was an historical figure. This discourse sets these two Russians on course for cataclysmic events.

The notorious Lubyanka: Little besides the name “secret police” is secret, which may be the point.

Bulgakov makes sport of sycophantic colleagues he despised. But in this nightmarish decade of Russian history which Bulgakov perhaps miraculously survived, sycophancy was no guarantee of the “good graces” of Stalin’s NKVD (Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs), the so-called “secret police” though little about them actually was “secret”. Writers, poets, and artists were among the millions exiled to labor camps or shot outright. Despite Bulgakov’s jokes and many references, the NKVD make people disappear only slightly less theatrically than Satan and his minions.

Мастер и Маргарита: Margarita gave Master his title and sewed “M” on his cap.

Master (Aleksandr Galibin) relates his story to fellow inmate Bezdomny in a state psychiatric institute: his novel about the historical Jesus and Pilate, its circumstances, and his muse Margarita Nikolayevna (Anna Kovalchuk) who dubbed him “Master”. Bezdomny is Bulgakov’s Everyman. Soviet “reality” is shot in sepia or muted blue moonlight, the work of the author’s imagination in color. Bulgakov’s novel, “written for the drawer” during the 1930s as was said in the Soviet period because the author had no expectation that it would be published, did not see light of day until 1966 in a censored edition.

“What is truth?” Master’s consideration of Pilat and Ga-Notsri ventures far beyond the Gospels.

Master crafts his novel from details in the Gospels. Though “from personal experience,” as Woland breezily assures the gaping Berlioz and Bezdomny, the Gospels are worthless as an historical source because the events they describe certainly never happened as recorded. So this is not a Sunday school New Testament story but a meditation on the relationship the author imagined between the historical figures Pontius Pilate (Kirill Lavrov) and Yeshua Ga-Notsri (Sergei Bezrukov). These scenes are filmed in color in Jerusalem and include parts by Kaifa (Valentin Gaft) who spares Var-Ravvana from crucifixion, Yuda iz Kiriafa (Dmitry Nagiyev), and Levi Matvei (Semyon Strugachyov), among others.

“Please allow me to introduce myself”: Satan and his minions test the mettle of New Soviet Man.

“Messir” Woland and his motley crew may remind those unfamiliar with Bulgakov’s novel of Charles Addams’s family of cheerful oddballs, featuring Koroviev (Aleksandr Abdulov), a tall voluble eccentric with narrow shoulders in clashing plaids and a pince-nez; Behemoth, an articulate black cat whose skills include card tricks (played in catsuit by Vano Miranyan and Semyon Furman and as a man by Aleksandr Bashirov); Azazello (Aleksandr Filippenko), Woland’s “enforcer”; and Gella (Tanya Yu) Woland’s sexy handmaid, disarmingly nearly naked to all but the gang: “Seen ‘em naked? I’ve seen ‘em flayed clean!” as one-eyed Azazello cheerfully says. Their palatial digs and fine food and drink were luxuries beyond all but a handful of the top party leadership, if even.

Полет—“Flight”: Liberated women explore Moscow’s upper atmosphere—быстрота и нагота, speed and nakedness.

“Flight”, our favorite chapter, in which Margarita and her maid Natasha (Kseniya Nazarova) apply Azazello’s body cream empowering them to fly to Satan’s Great Ball—Margarita on a broom, Natasha on their prurient neighbor Nikolai Ivanovich (Vadim Lobanov) turned into a pig—may be best imagined by each reader from the written word than fixed onscreen for all. The original conveys an exhilarating sense of flying free of earthbound oppression. Special effects render them less than entirely naked, though the extended initiation ceremony that precedes Satan’s Ball and the ball itself may display more barenaked ladies than many Americans would be comfortable with.

Reception at Satan’s Great Ball—the barenaked ladies are straight from the novel.

Rather than trouble over shoveling each detail into a ditch of identity and meaning, enjoy the romp for what it is, a great belly-laugh over the human condition and the high-blown hyperbole of political rhetoric, from all time for all time, and well-suited to troubled times anywhere. And read the novel: We discovered “Master and Margarita” through Mirra Ginsburg’s delightful translation of the first-published manuscript; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are among several who have translated a subsequent fuller version.

Woland to the Master: Рукописи не горят—“Manuscripts do not burn.”

Master i Margarita (2005) Russia. Goskino; Rossiya 1. Series directed by Vladimir Bortko, adapted by Bortko from the novel by Mikhail A. Bulgakov; produced by Bortko and Ruben Dishdishian; music by Igor Kornelyuk; cinematography by Valeri Myulgaut; editing by Leda Semyonova; production design by Marina Nikolaeva and Vladimir Svetozarov; set decoration by Yevgeny Krasilnikov and Marina Zubkova; series costume design by Nadezhda Vasileva.

Ivan Bezdomny (Vladislav Galkin) is a Soviet Everyman in “Master and Margarita”.

Maddest Men

Unfamiliar with Martin Amis's novel, a single viewing of The Zone of Interest clarified neither the “zone” nor the “interest”, if not simply the German Third Reich’s wartime death factories at Oświęcim in western Poland, or the domestic circumstances of Auschwitz-Birkenau camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) who lived next door.

We consider this tale through the lens of the U.S. management class as it appears for instance in the AMC series Mad Men (2007-2015), imagining a senior executive preparing a performance evaluation. Höss, an energetic young executive, runs his firm’s premier operation abroad where he, his homemaker wife Hedwig, and their growing family enjoy full company perquisites which include a furnished home and domestic servants. Neither spouse is of the management class. Höss’s zeal and attention to detail indicate advancement potential and he is supported by his wife’s ambitions for him and their family. 

The couple also displayed initiative using local resources to build a showplace family home directly outside factory walls which throb with efficiency around the clock, complete with a garden, swimming pool, and greenhouse. When the company temporarily transfers Höss closer to the home office to evaluate his performance in a legacy operation, it approves his request to keep his family at Auschwitz. He is promoted and returned to the premier operation to lead a major firm initiative in his name.

Of course, in stark contrast to U.S. advertising executives competing for accounts to market cigarettes or home appliances, this German organization man is tasked to reduce entire populations of human beings to enslavement or ashes and stockpiles of reusable commodity goods.

A poignant detail arises when Hüller's Hedwig finds lipstick in a fur coat stolen from an internee—one of her husband’s perquisites. Trying on the lipstick in a private moment before her bedroom mirror she makes an intimate connection, a kind of kiss between lips that owned it and lips that stole it. A child plays knucklebones with former gold dental hardware. We wondered also what dogs outside the camp, like the Höss family dog, heard from dogs’ constant barking inside it.

The Zone of Interest 2023 U.S./U.K./Poland (105 minutes) A24/Access Entertainment/Film4. Direc.ted by Jonathan Glazer from his screen.play adaptation of Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of this title; music by Mica Levi; ci.nematography by Łukasz Żal; editing by Paul Watts; production desi.gn by Chris Oddy; costume desig.n by Małgorzata Karpiuk; produced by Ewa Puszczyńska and James Wilson.

Anything goes

International House 1933 Paramount (69 minutes) directed by Edward Sutherland, screenplay by Francis Martin and Walter DeLeon; cinematography by Ernest Haller; costumes by Travis Banton.

This zany W.C. Fields vehicle is an odd little pre-code gem of a variety show, set in China, which even more oddly would prefigure the brave new world of YouTube TV.

A lot happens in the film’s running time of slightly more than one hour.

Dr. Wong (Edmund Breese), a Chinese inventor, intends to sell the rights to his video-receiving ‘radioscope’ at International House, a luxurious hotel in Wu Hu, China.

The radioscope is an eccentric and marvelous wi-fi-like contrivance a generation before most Americans even could imagine television. Here it provides a venue for the full range of popular radio, news, sports, and musical and comedy acts of the day. In one scene, Fields ‘interacts’ with several video clips—much less surrealistically in our YouTube day than it was in his own.

(John Seabrook wrote recently of YouTube’s new television venture in Streaming Dreams in The New Yorker magazine, January 16, 2012.)

The American Electric Company sends Thomas Nash (Stuart Erwin), a boyish, earnest American executive, to Wu Hu to buy the rights. Since these movies invariably include a love story, Nash hopes to marry Carol Fortescue (Sari Maritza), daughter of Sir Mortimer Fortescue (Lumsden Hare), a senior British commercial representative.

Peggy Hopkins Joyce, whose contemporary celebrity apparently derived from serially beneficial marriages, plays a recherchée platinum blonde fashion plate trying to snag a rich new husband whilst teasing her rich ex, General Nicholas Baranosky Petronovich (Bela Lugosi) who is also in town to buy the rights to the radioscope.

And Professor Henry R. Quail (Fields) is circumnavigating the globe in his autogyro ‘The Spirit of Brooklyn’ (Charles Lindberg made his famous New York-Paris flight in ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’ six years before the movie came out), headed for Kansas City but landing instead on the roof of Wu Hu’s International House.

The opening title is Chinese. The Chinese signage looks legitimate; there are many uncredited Chinese extras and, occasionally, the Chinese characters (and once Nash) speak Chinese. That said, a Caucasian actor plays the lead Chinese character, Dr. Wong. And the fictional place name ‘Wu Hu’ is a running joke throughout the film, from train whistles to cuckoo clocks to a small Chinese newsboy.

When Fields first lands his autogyro on the hotel, he asks whether he is in Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri.

‘Whoo-hoo!’ calls out Joyce.

‘Whoo-hoo to you, sweetheart,’ Fields says, then gesturing to the hotel manager (Frederic Pangborn), ‘Hey Charlie, where am I?’

‘Wu Hu,’ replies the feyly peevish Pangborn.

Fields pulls the carnation from his buttonhole.

‘Don’t let the posy fool you.’

Everyone settles down for the floor show—a ‘Cosmopolitan Chorus of 50 International Beauties and Sing How’s Syncopators’—with Lona André as a ‘China Tea Cup’ and Sterling Holloway as the American sailor ‘Coffee Mug’, an array of lovely women in not much besides clear plastic tea service costumes, see-through silks, and matching lyrics—‘She was a saucy saucer, who met him at every meal/She was a torso tosser, with lots of sex appeal.’

The finale is along these lines of, but surprisingly more revealing than The Dude’s dream flight beneath bowling pins’ skirts in The Big Lebowski (1998). Leave it to beaver shots: no wonder some of the men with floorside tables watch through opera glasses.

Fields’ scenes are loaded with his quickly discarded double entendres, the funnier because he shuffles from one to the next better with little fanfare.

Joyce: ‘I’m sitting on something.’

Fields: ‘I lost mine in the stock market.’

(It turns out of course that she is sitting on a ‘pussy,’ which Fields releases to live its other eight lives.)

Woman: ‘Won’t you join me in a glass of wine?’

Fields: ‘You get in first, and if there’s room enough, I’ll join you.’

Peggy Hopkins Joyce: 'Now can you see anything?' Fields: 'Practically everything.'

There is a lovely, silent three-minute sequence in which first Fields, then Joyce, enter the same hotel room, undress, prepare for and get into two very close twin beds without seeing each other until he starts snoring after they turn the lights out. 

Perhaps the most surprising content comes in Cab Calloway and his band’s appearance on the radioscope. The bass player is beating rhythmically at his strings.

Calloway: ‘What’s the matter with this cat here?’

Band: ‘He’s high!’

Calloway: ‘What do you mean, he’s high?’

Band: ‘Full of weed.’

Calloway: ‘Full of weed?’

Band: ‘Yeah!’

Calloway: ‘Who is this cat anyway?’

Band: ‘That’s the reefer man.’

Alas, the fun ended in 1934, when the Hayes Office started to enforce the industry’s self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—and continued to do so for nearly three decades.