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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
