‘Still Life’ offers striking look into everyday China

The huge Three Gorges Dam project in China continues to be a ripe source of material for filmmakers; the latest offering is “Still Life,” a fictional feature from director Jia Zhang-ke.

“Latest” isn’t quite right, since this film won the top prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. The delay in distribution is no mystery — “Still Life” is a drifting movie with only a glancing connection to conventional drama. But if you know that going in, you might find yourself transfixed.

For the opening 40 minutes or so, we follow a man (Han Sanming) as he arrives in the slowly drowning town of Fengjie. Like many other places along the Yangtze River, the town is vanishing beneath the rising waters behind the dam (the project has displaced more than a million people).

The man has been separated from his wife and daughter for 16 years, and is looking for them in what’s left of the town. We watch his wanderings for a while, then shift to a woman (Zhao Tao) who is also looking for a missing spouse — not to reunite with him, but to divorce him.

When it becomes clear that these journeys are not building toward any recognizable story­line, it’s easier to slip into the observational mode that director Jia is pursuing. Every scene brings a new vignette that feels absolutely authentic: the way workers take their lunch break or knock down a building, the way bureaucracy functions in a small town, the way pop culture provides comfort in chaos.

The only exceptions to this authenticity: a couple of UFO sightings, which pass by with the same naturalistic calm as the rest of the picture. It’s as though Jia is reminding us that documentary realism is not his goal, even though the movie sometimes feels like a nonfiction look at life in China today.

And it is life: not the big issues, though we will think about poverty and displacement during the course of the film, but the day-to-day issues of how people communicate in difficult circumstances, how they dress and eat, how progress eats up communities.

“Still Life” is shot on high-definition video, which gives a hyper-real quality to the images. If there’s been a more striking combination of everyday reality and the poetic in movies lately, I don’t know what it is.