It's not about anything you'd expect it to be. Not about bioethics, not about necropolitics, not about technocracy, but about the allure of conspiratorial theorising as a coping mechanism, and the place paranoia seems to hold in the current society.
But...I'm not sure the film is right about any of it. And, more importantly, I am rightly paranoid about why it seems so enthusiastic, in its Cronenbergian detachment and coldness, to convince us of it being right.
Still, very surprising,…
While later Jia is still using contentious emotional beats to abstract politics and smear them into melodrama and now-stereotypies of asian arthouse, this was such a palette cleanser: not great, but just like a revisited copy of something that was once great.
A still image of building upon looks just like a still image of destroying,
looking for someone always involves escaping,
panopticon is alienation,
tradition is a lost time's pop,
and losing is universal, just like what you're losing it to.
I cannot understand any praise this film has gotten. It repeats the director's trope for violence being LITERALLY infectuous (murders = collisions like car accidents, like The Original Car Accident), and for wounded or modified people looking for positive affects through modified relationship systems, like family, but dresses it in disjointed story bits (including horror-pregnancy clichés!), and none of them are truly necessary.
The one-tone direction throughout tells me everything I need to know about the film only using one…
Half a star for the parallels of detachment (the politics of geography and the borders of nation and alliances on the one side and the distance of historiography itself and museums on the other side), because otherwise this is hurtful and exactly what you are expecting when reading either the synopsis or who the director is.
Some people learn exactly the wrong things from the slow cinema movements, turning their methods into fascist, festival-ist language.
Incredible music, though.
