Jamie passion and passionfruit!

Competent Austrian film, which won the Oscar for Best foreign language film.  There is no denying that it is a well constructed watchable movie with no series gaffes and an interesting story to tell.  Somehow it just never quite takes off for me and does seem somewhat calculated.  Karl Markovics as Sorowitsch does a very good job with satisfactory supporting actors and good photography.  This does not have the same transcendent qualities of Schindler’s List or Fearless but does give us food for thought.  Great tango music too!

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It may not be a masterpiece but Still Life has many features to recommend it.  First, the vision of the director to shoot a film in Feng jie, a town being demolished brick by brick to make way for the massive Three Gorges Valley Dam.  In this desolate landscape of uncertain futures and mass migration of locals, both out to seek a new life and inwards to work on the demolition we see two stories: a man searching for his wife and daughter after 16 years and a woman looking for her husband who came to work on one of the projects.  But the main merit of the movie is not the plot but all that we see – the setting, the humidity in the place, the desperate search to make a living and the sense that progress is somehow chaotic and beyond any real assessment by anyone involved.  It happens and people adapt.  Seeing the real living conditions of many Chinese in this movie may be a shock but this is probably the truth of what goes on in industrialized China and despite the grand splendour of the geography what man has done is not pretty.  The movie is slow moving but generally absorbing though I found parts of the woman’s story dragged.  Zhang-Ke Jia adds in some magic realism for good measure and overall the lyrical photography and music round the film out.

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