ICE AGE
AS CYCLES OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND consumption are increasingly beset with carefully calibrated career-advancing controversies and histrionics, the notion of true sacrifice for one’s art, of genuine risk-taking, of a cinema inextricable from the toil of lived reality can seem more remote than ever. The titular animal in Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a fabled creature in inner Mongolia’s Manzhouli, the odd object of preoccupation for the film’s four dissipated characters that is at once ancient and stoic; an inanimate, timeworn witness to human atrocities and a symbol of resistance against a hostile world of smugness and decadence—in short, an apt metaphor for the pursuit of such a pure cinema. But in the time following the film’s tormented production as its writer-director-editor took his own life at 29 years old, An Elephant Sitting Still and its emblem also became inevitably imbued with a sense of individual tragedy and isolation, becoming an arresting epitaph to a fierce artistic spirit and sadly truncated personal history.
Set in the arid, follows a day in the life of four society burnouts brought together by a series of interconnected hapless-life-altering events. Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), a local gangster, is talking about the Manzhouli elephant to his best friend’s wife, with whom he has been carrying on an attenuated affair, when the friend returns home unexpectedly to find Yu’s shoes. Suddenly understanding the situation, the friend plummets to his death from the high-rise apartment in a grim act witnessed by both adulterers. Meanwhile, Yu Cheng’s younger brother Yu Shuai is the reigning bully at the local high school. His classmate Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang), the film’s protagonist and possibly the filmmaker’s stand-in, is the frequent subject of Yu Shuai’s taunting. Wei is a quietly brooding outcast—a Chinese Antoine Monnier—who is also mysteriously beguiled by the existence of the Manzhouli elephant. In attempting to defend his friend Li Kai, who is accused of stealing the bully’s cell phone, Wei accidentally jostles Shuai down a flight of stairs, resulting in Shuai’s hospitalization and eventual death.
