Like 24 City, this is a half documentary/half fictional exploration of subjects in a modernizing China. This is mostly isolated, though, to one man, painter Liu Xiao-dong. Dong (the film) is mostly tedious and only intermittently interesting. Since it was merely an ‘extra feature’ on my Still Life DVD, I’m going to store it in my memory as an inconsequential side project; it does seem, after all, to be made mostly of unused material from Still Life (very similar to how David Lynch used leftover footage from INLAND EMPIRE to create the More Things That Happened special feature on the DVD). When the film is actually showing Liu, it works pretty well. Watching him paint was like the old days on PBS with Bob Ross, very relaxing; Liu, though, has more sophisticated commentary than Ross, and doesn’t personify his background landscapes and brush strokes. Where the film falters, though, is in the other 85% of the film, in which the camera roams over the city and eavesdrops on civilians as if Jia was desperately trying to stretch this into feature length. While shots of men tearing down buildings and flooded neighborhoods enhanced Still Life on a spiritual level, they have no business in this film. Liu is a figure painter and not much more. Social and Political issues aren’t present in any of his works shown in this film, so it feels heavy-handed when Jia self-consciously tries to force it in like this.
This is an interesting failure, though. I think this film shows how ambitious Jia is, because he is always trying to elevate his work above simple portraits. Usually it works quite well, but this film should have been a short, and if he wanted it to be a feature, then he should have spent the time to get a few hours of interesting material to work with instead of probably about 20 minutes of good material.