Many people admire cinematic long takes because unedited shots preserve continuous time. But you’ll see one in Kaili Blues that throws the very concept of time into question.
Director Bi Gan’s impressive feature debut has earned festival accolades and comparisons to the work of Alain Resnais and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, both known for their meditations on time, history and memory.
It also has almost no chance of a weeklong theatrical run in Madison. That’s a loss for Madison cinephiles who can’t make the sole screening on Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. at MMoCA.
The elliptical storytelling in Kaili Blues challenges the viewer to slowly piece together the backstory. Chen (Chen Yongzhong), a practitioner at a small clinic in Kaili (Guizhou province, southwestern China), has a tense relationship with his brother, nicknamed Crazy Face (Xie Lixun). Chen disapproves of how Crazy Face treats his son, Weiwei (Luo Feiyang), and Crazy Face remains bitter that Chen inherited their mother’s estate. When Crazy Face sends Weiwei to the town of Zhenyuan under suspicious circumstances, Chen insists on retrieving him.
Loss and regret suffocate many of the film’s characters. Before Chen’s departure, an older doctor at the clinic requests a favor. She has lost touch with an old love who is in failing health in the village of Dangmai. She owes him some sentimental items and asks Chen to deliver them for her. Because Kaili Blues traffics in muted emotions, several repeating motifs carry significant emotional weight: watches, glitter balls, cassette tapes, trains, legends of “wild men” and a shirt the doctor wants delivered to Dangmai.
In an exhilarating sequence in Dangmai, Bi Gan delivers that memorable long take. The 41-minute hand-held shot blurs past, present and future, rewarding attentive viewers and provoking second-guessing about what we’re watching. As with the earlier motifs, viewers must pay close attention to character names for the sequence to exert its full resonance.
An emotional Chen fills in the backstory when he recalls a “friend.” We assemble the pieces of Chen’s puzzle and begin to understand why he describes his brief time in Dangmai as “like living in a dream.”
Kaili Blues is part of MMoCA’s Spotlight Cinema series, which continues Wednesday nights through November to fill Madison’s international art cinema gap. The gap widens at the top: the last two Cannes Palm d’Or winners, for example, have had only one-off screenings in town, including Dheepan at Spotlight last month. The gap will close only when distributors see support for films like Kaili Blues throughout the year.
