Let's start by noting the aspects of this film which are worthy of positive comment: clearly a disciple of Béla Tarr's approach to camera movement, director, Hu Bo, takes his time to glide alongside his characters using highly-mobile digital shots to capture kinetic sequences, which, at their best, offer immersion and engagement. The camera not cutting forces the viewer to keep looking. There is no respite, you are visually pulled into Bo's world and forced to bear witness to what it has to offer.
The highly saturated colour-palette also serves to aid in establishing the mood. Scenes are replete with pastel greys and washed-out blues. The absence of colour also becomes a notable feature as characters' shadows are often used to foreground scenes. As well as adding to the film's melancholy ambience, there is a certain intrigue created in such use of hue and framing. The film's acting is also a strong point. The main characters are all committed to their roles and convincingly exude vulnerability, loneliness and suffering.
The issue with the film, however, is its lack of narrative nuance or any form of emotional balance. It is highly unlikely that, in viewing a day in the life of a small group of individuals, we would bear witness to: 2 suicides, one accidental murder, a death via natural causes, a shooting, a vicious baseball bat attack, the kidnapping of a young girl and the mauling of a little dog. Yet, in this 4-hour misery-fest, the audience is treated to just that alongside various verbal eviscerations and expressions of toxic indifference to any form of human suffering. The film is clearly the product of an individual who was in a severely depressive state, as such, it lacks emotional range,only having the capacity to represent numbness and antipathy.
Yet the state of mind of the individual who served as the singular director, writer and editor of the film is not the only factor that places limitations on this piece. This being his first feature film, it appears that Bo had not yet developed the discipline to even attempt to stray outside of his own background in order to attempt to represent something of the world that did not pertain to his own direct experience. Just for the sake of attempting to represent something realistic about human society more generally, the film would have benefited from some sort of inclusion of the reasons why most people don't choose to jump out of windows or bash people over the head with baseball bats. A parent showing a glimmer of affection for their child, for example, a couple who had anything like requited romantic feelings, or perhaps just one person giving another person a hug once in a while would have provided at least something of a counterbalance to the anger and hatred on display. But there are no such moments (besides a grandparent making the questionable decision to take his granddaughter on a one-way trip without her parents' knowledge that is). This is because the film has no interest in what makes people want to live, its only focus is on why one would wish they hadn't been fated to exist in the first place.
In its self-limited immaturity, the film is reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia": a film which was, essentially, a big, unrestrained exhibition of inner-turmoil: an indulgent, unfiltered distillation of intense subjectivity. However, while Anderson's film represented a childish crusade of redemption, Bo's film is a choral bleating of hopelessness.
The above may seem rather insensitive bearing in mind Bo's tragic suicide after the making of the film, but I feel that subjecting oneself to the entire run-time of the movie entitles one to at least provide their own honest reflections. So allow me to conclude that this is a film which possesses intriguing technique and shows the director had promise had he wished to live in order to realise it. However, its narrative and tone is far too stuck in its own head to provide a meaningful statement on a world beyond the psychological narrowness of its creator and is, thus, a fundamentally limited and mawkishly mournful effort. It is probably worth noting, however, that if you are going into this film because you want to see what unmitigated depression looks like in cinematic form, you will be fully satisfied.
The highly saturated colour-palette also serves to aid in establishing the mood. Scenes are replete with pastel greys and washed-out blues. The absence of colour also becomes a notable feature as characters' shadows are often used to foreground scenes. As well as adding to the film's melancholy ambience, there is a certain intrigue created in such use of hue and framing. The film's acting is also a strong point. The main characters are all committed to their roles and convincingly exude vulnerability, loneliness and suffering.
The issue with the film, however, is its lack of narrative nuance or any form of emotional balance. It is highly unlikely that, in viewing a day in the life of a small group of individuals, we would bear witness to: 2 suicides, one accidental murder, a death via natural causes, a shooting, a vicious baseball bat attack, the kidnapping of a young girl and the mauling of a little dog. Yet, in this 4-hour misery-fest, the audience is treated to just that alongside various verbal eviscerations and expressions of toxic indifference to any form of human suffering. The film is clearly the product of an individual who was in a severely depressive state, as such, it lacks emotional range,only having the capacity to represent numbness and antipathy.
Yet the state of mind of the individual who served as the singular director, writer and editor of the film is not the only factor that places limitations on this piece. This being his first feature film, it appears that Bo had not yet developed the discipline to even attempt to stray outside of his own background in order to attempt to represent something of the world that did not pertain to his own direct experience. Just for the sake of attempting to represent something realistic about human society more generally, the film would have benefited from some sort of inclusion of the reasons why most people don't choose to jump out of windows or bash people over the head with baseball bats. A parent showing a glimmer of affection for their child, for example, a couple who had anything like requited romantic feelings, or perhaps just one person giving another person a hug once in a while would have provided at least something of a counterbalance to the anger and hatred on display. But there are no such moments (besides a grandparent making the questionable decision to take his granddaughter on a one-way trip without her parents' knowledge that is). This is because the film has no interest in what makes people want to live, its only focus is on why one would wish they hadn't been fated to exist in the first place.
In its self-limited immaturity, the film is reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia": a film which was, essentially, a big, unrestrained exhibition of inner-turmoil: an indulgent, unfiltered distillation of intense subjectivity. However, while Anderson's film represented a childish crusade of redemption, Bo's film is a choral bleating of hopelessness.
The above may seem rather insensitive bearing in mind Bo's tragic suicide after the making of the film, but I feel that subjecting oneself to the entire run-time of the movie entitles one to at least provide their own honest reflections. So allow me to conclude that this is a film which possesses intriguing technique and shows the director had promise had he wished to live in order to realise it. However, its narrative and tone is far too stuck in its own head to provide a meaningful statement on a world beyond the psychological narrowness of its creator and is, thus, a fundamentally limited and mawkishly mournful effort. It is probably worth noting, however, that if you are going into this film because you want to see what unmitigated depression looks like in cinematic form, you will be fully satisfied.