Now in his mid-30s, Chinese writer/director Bi Gan is a representative of a new wave of Chinese filmmakers coming after the so-called Fifth and Sixth Generation. The number designating how removed they are from the establishment of Communist China. (No one’s thought of calling them the Seventh?) KAILI, now a decade old, serving as Bi’s international calling card, even though, for non Chinese, it can be frustratingly opaque. (Nearly typed ‘inscrutable,’ but the term, like the use of ‘Oriental’ as a race designation, has been retired from polite conversation.) A rural roadtrip film, it moves as much thru time & memory as kilometers, very loosely organized by two half-brothers and the Search for Weiwei, son of one/nephew to the other.* The true father a jailbird with little contact; the uncle more involved before ‘selling’ the boy, now grown and lost. The uncle takes the lead and we follow as he starts to look for Weiwei on a journey employing a slippery timeline not nailed down for us. Instead, we (or rather the uncle) randomly meet new people along the way who delineate the society of this back country for us; climaxing in a small town where Bi employs a long (and I mean long) continuous tracking shot to take us around the corners and thru stairways, gateways, inner courtyards and secluded passageways of the small town. An impressive feat that turns the village into a maze as complicated as the whiff of a storyline allows it to be. Almost post-narrative in design, the film is worth the confusion. Later work from Bi may be a pleasure to connect with, but in general, I was more intrigued than carried away.
SCEWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Wei Wei, of course, the name of an internationally famous, Chinese censored, artist. Whether the name of the son was chosen to reflect this isn’t specified.
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