Clocking in at nearly four hours, this is one of the longest films we’ve watched. It’s also one of the darkest, an observation that is made especially poignant by the fact that its director Hu Bo committed suicide shortly after finishing it at the age of 29. The film itself is based on a novel by the director himself, apparently being what caused him to shoot to fame. This therefore represents the director’s first and final feature film.

The lives of multiple people are intertwined over the course of a single day in this film. Yu Cheng is a local gangster who sleeps with the wife of a friend and is subsequently discovered, leading his friend to leap from his apartment window to his death. Wang Jin is a pensioner whose family wants to send him to an old folks’ home and his only companion, his pet dog, is killed by another dog. Wei Bu is a schoolboy who lives in the same building as Wang Jin. He helps his friend stand up to a bully who has accused the friend of stealing a mobile phone and accidentally pushes the bully down the stairs. It just so happens that the bully’s older brother is Yu Cheng. Wei Bu seems to have feelings for a classmate Huang Ling but she has a terrible relationship with her mother and has a secret of her own. Each of the characters also hear a story about an elephant in the faraway city of Manzhouli which seemingly sits still while the world turns and sees in it a kind of escape from their individual troubles.

This isn’t an easy film to sit through and not just because of its length. The cinematographer favors close-ups of the performers, often just their heads and shoulders from the back as they walk around, with a very shallow depth of field. This causes large swathes of the image to be blurry, including the faces of the people the characters are speaking to, which nearly gave me a headache. The quality of the sound capture is poor as well, resulting in often unintelligible dialogue and unpleasant pops and squeals. I’m not sure if this was due to a limited budget or by design to reflect the alienation each character feels. It does have to be said that the director manages to wring excellent performances out of everyone so his technical skills and grasp of human drama are impeccable.

A more uncomfortable reason is that the more you watch this film, the more you realize that the director’s mind dwells in a dark, depressing place. While there is a decent diversity of characters in here, each with their own set of problems and stresses, you soon realize that all of their them share the exact same mindset: that life is suffering. This is made even more obvious when two of the older characters teach the same life lesson: the young often seek to escape their problems by moving to a new place and hope for a fresh start but the harsh reality is that you just run into the same problems in the new place. There is never even the slightest hope for respite and not the least bit of joy. Yu Cheng feels guilty for instigating his friend’s suicide but reasons that he is better off dead. When Huang Ling complains to her mother, the response is that everyone is similarly in pain and no one can do anything about it. Unlike other tragedies, it’s impossible for the viewer to sympathize with the characters because the film is so unbalanced and so alien in its perspective. As normal people do feel more than just depression all of the time, you soon realize this film says more about the director’s personal state of mind that life in general.

Given its problems and that it does not really connect with most people on an emotional level, it is not anything that I would consider great. However it is indeed a very unique film that works as a window into the attitudes and mindset of a person with severe depression. I think it is also a cry for help that presaged the director’s eventual suicide.