An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, 2018)

A very remarkable debut film indeed, and a wonderful start to my 2019 cinema-going (oh how lucky I am to live so near Bristol's Watershed…). An Elephant Sitting Still tells the story of one day (more-or-less) in the lives of four apparently unremarkable protagonists: two teenagers, an older gangster, and an elderly man whose adult children are looking to shift him off to a care home. These lives are – inevitably, but also very skilfully – interwoven. (Only at the film's end did one or two conjunctions or coincidences strike me as perhaps a little too neat.) Though it is probably, at the very least, in poor taste to say so, given the director/writer's suicide shortly after completing the film, the material about the unalterable bleakness of existence seems to me one of the least convincing, and certainly least distinctive, aspects of the film. Much more intriguing are its investigations of responsibility. The film explores a wide range of permutations of what it means to take responsibility – or to avoid taking it, or to refuse to take it – as well as interrogating when and why such decisions are imposed on us, and what their consequences can be. Is taking responsibility something we do once, in a moment – when we "own up" – or is it a way of living that needs to be continually (re)enacted? These investigations are carefully patterned (one character, for example, falls from a building; later two more are struck; between these moments another falls down a flight of stairs because they are struck) but these patterns are delicate and never intrude. Nor, thankfully, did I detect much in the way of allegorical pretention, despite the fact that (inter)generational responsibility is very important to the narrative. (The titular elephant is another matter, and I did have concerns now and then about its "message", but the final scene won me over.) 

The cinematography is remarkably achieved. Perhaps inevitably, the film has a subdued palette of browns, flinty blues, and dingy greens, but it manages somehow to avoid the clichéd desaturation that so often signifies bleakness nowadays. The virtuoso long takes and camera movements certainly mean it is no surprise to discover that Hu Bo studied with Béla Tarr, but they are put to distinctive and effective usage. I particularly liked the film's tendency to hold a certain framing for such a long time that the movement that follows is surprising and enlightening. There is an equally distinctive and virtuosic use of extremely shallow focus, such that for much of the film only the protagonist currently onscreen is in focus. Among its other effects, this means that when the profoundly unsympathetic mother of one of the protagonists is, eventually, seen in sharp focus for the first time, this contributes strongly – if ambiguously – to encouraging us to rethink our attitude to her. 

It would be foolish to say that, in a film of almost four hours, every moment was essential, but the film doesn't drag. The plot is often engrossing, with quite a number of tense confrontations, and the film avoids the cliché of concluding shots by holding them beyond all obvious rationale; in fact, when the – sometimes very long – takes do eventually end they often do so surprisingly abruptly. Eventually, I started to wonder where the end would come, but the slight sense I had of multiple endings was (I think) due more to my awareness that the end had to be arriving than to a failing of the film. We're less adept at judging proportion in very long films, I guess, due to being less experienced in watching them. When the final shot/scene does come (I shan't spoil it, but it involves a hillside, a coach, a fairly maladroit game of keepie-uppie and some fantastic noises), it has a remarkable poise and beauty. It's also, surprisingly, rather funny, which serves in retrospect to underline an (admittedly subtle) strand of humour that runs through the whole film, and is all the more interesting for taking the form of a rather weary irony rather than the black humour that might have been a more obvious route to have taken.