A mournful, magisterial, and often moving debut feature, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still might best be described as a contemplation of despair—or, more specifically, as an incremental, painful probing of how much a single person can bear before they're driven to tragic release. Born in 1988, Hu took his life soon after completing the film, and since its premiere in the Forum section of last year's Berlinale, the feature has been nigh-impossible to view apart from that fact. Its opening minutes tell of an elephant in the northern Chinese town of Manzhouli that simply sits, unmoving, and ignores the world. The seemingly apocryphal tale—which one might consider alongside the ancient Indian fable of the blind men and an elephant—is taken from the director’s novel Huge Crack (2017), and also serves as the primary motivator of the story’s harried principal characters, for whom Manzhouli becomes a kind of mythical haven,...
- 3/11/2019
- MUBI
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