EssenceStory Well Deserved Praise

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Yazmin Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

ThurstonHunger Your mileage may vary depending on which direction the trains and time are flowing. Curious to see bi-lingual Mandarin/English reviews, I tried to pause on the poems voiced over during the film, but too often they washed over me like the constant flow of water through-out.The film is both heavy on symbolism, as well as strongly rooted on the earth, specifically the territory in the Guizhou Province, which apparently looks both rustic and post-industrial. Another review mentioned vehicles that fail that is a good metaphor for the film, but the viewer does travel with this film, if not where one might expect.I am curious if the language ends up being a bigger tipping point to what is at play here. The blurring of characters/time perhaps indicated by key phrases or tenses. Or even in tense phrases, the scene in the make-shift salon where our Dr. Hero gets his haircut felt unsettling in an interesting way. And I wasn't even the woman giving the good Dr. his trim.Besides the much discussed long single shot, so much fascinating tracking done (presumably by quite and highly reliable motorcycles) and great projected images at times.Again I remain curious if this feels foreign to even folks familiar with the physical, if not emotional territory covered. I look forward to more films from Gan Bi after this auspicious beginning.

lasttimeisaw Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan's awards-winning debut, KAILI BLUES, in fact, the literal translation of its Chinese title is "roadside picnic", which appears to be the name of a frayed paperback collection of poems we can glance in one scene relatively near the beginning, and indeed poem suffuses in Bi's oneiric idiom, told through the voice-over of our protagonist Chen Shen (Chen Yongzhong).The opening shot is a nearly 360-degree roving take setting against in a fixed position, a sparse clinic where Chen works with an elderly doctor (Zhao), they live in Kaili, a foggy, soggy, slight crummy town in China's southeast, subtropical Guizhou province. In lieu of plying audience with Chen's backstory, Bi cogently puts beauty derived from quotidian scenery in a salient place where a laconic storyline takes its form most subtly, the place where a young boy Weiwei (Luo) and his father Crazy Face (Xie) lives is decrepit and noisy to a fault, but strikingly there is a cascade just in vicinity, which promptly gives the said place an almost surreal grandeur, also Bi manifests his ingenuity by capturing the reflection of a passing train on the wall, a blunt intrusion brutally shattering the homely equilibrium but who can deny its aesthetic signification, plus, a passing train would later give the film's ending a divine "turning-back-time" coup-de-maître.Soon it transpires that Chen is an ex-convict, and Crazy Face is his brother, but there is bad blood between them (which always has to do with family inheritance, properties in particular), Chen notices that Crazy Face is a deliberately negligent parent and suspects that he is going to sell Weiwei. So when Weiwei is sent away to Monk (Yang), a former gangster ringleader Chen once worked for and for whom he is locked behind the bars, he embarks on an excursion to look for his nephew Zhenyuan, and concurrently, to locate his colleague's old flame, who has Miao pedigree and now falls gravely ill. The magic occurs when he reaches a town called Dang Mai, where Bi employs an audacious long take running over 40 minutes following Chen and other people he meets there, in particular, a local girl Yangyang (Guo), who is going to work as a tourist guide in Kaili and a young man also named Weiwei (Yu) who overtly carries a torch for her but she seems not to reciprocate. When reality, past, dream are entwined in that bucolic loop, Bi even risks betraying the camera's own existence in order to achieve this cinematic wizardry, is this Weiwei is a future version of Chen's nephew? Does the hairdresser (Liu) he meets is a reincarnation of his deceased wife? When Chen wears the shirt which is delivered to his colleague's Miao lover, is he reliving an imaginative past to give away the cassette, the pledge of romance and courtship? There are cues and incongruities, but the whole enterprise is so remarkably done that should it be singled out as an absolute high water mark from a tenderfoot in the sphere of filmmaking. Taking the mantle from Chinese indie trailblazers (Jia Zhangke is the obvious object of reference), Bi Gan has a particular knack of marshaling amateur cast and sampling everyday settings to evince a strangely, but also affectingly enigmatic quality bordering on an amalgam of warmth, other-worldliness and allure, converging with its poetic undertow, kismet-galvanized mythos, beguiling scenery shots, peculiar camera composition and astonishing visual fluidity, plus other perverse quirks: the movie's title materializes roughly 30 minutes into its duration, and its opening credits are read out loud which harks back to Pasolini's THE HAWK AND THE SPARROW (1966, 7.5/10) where the credits are given a singsong treatment, KAILI BLUES is the whole package for art cinephiles, and more encouragingly, Bi Gan is very possible, "the" most electrifying discoveries of recent Chinese cinema.

theironorchid I have never written a review for IMDb, but I was so mystified by the positive ratings on this film, I felt compelled to give my opinion.First I will admit I am a US citizen from the Midwest. As such, it is possible I just don't get this film based upon my cultural biases. I have been a member of our local "foreign film series" since 1999, so I have plenty of experience with non-US films.Kaili Blues bored me to death. First are the inexplicable behaviors of the main characters and their motivation (see above as to my admission of cultural ignorance). I couldn't understand anything they chose to do. On top of that was an almost non-existent story – characters just seemed to go from place to place with no reason. In one case, literally so – a young girl just walks a large circle. Finally, a lack of any urgency of the characters left me cold.I will admit to one clever moment at the end that MAY have explained the film, but it came too little, too late.Six people got up and left the theater. I wish I had.

CARMELO Like this movie, because the dense atmosphere seemed to correlate with their own, the plumes of water vapor, cloudy day long, lonely forest, Yamanaka Shizu River, a mysterious legend, obvious signs of agricultural and semi modern town have is experience in southern scene, director in the landscape made a strange alienation effect, like hide and seek, in daily life in digging a secret tunnel, the legends and anecdotes, reality and illusion of hybrid, leading to different degrees of time, cross parallel character trajectory, their involvement, and independent. Carey, swing wheat, Zhenyuan, three a geographical noun, strung up now and in the future, in the past, Chen l like a man without a history, very strange blankness and obscure, someone says his former, like talking about their own, when he say to other people in the past, like yourself. To Zhenyuan Chen L and to find Wei Wei, looking for the old doctor's old lover, rather a journey into the unknown, to find a retreat.