“If you never do anything for anyone else you are spared the tragedy of human relationships”
This opening line to the Robert Creeley poem “The Immoral Proposition” rattled around in my brain all the time when I was a teen. (I was not a happy teenager.) It's been running through my head again lately after something reminded me of it a few weeks ago. This was about the same time I first watched Bi Gan's enrapturing first feature Kaili Blues.
Kaili Blues is a 2015 Chinese film directed by then 26-year-old Bi. It's about time and memory and connection, subjects I've given some thought to recently. J. Hoberman describes the film as “primarily concerned with developing a film language that treats memory as a tangible thing. Objects here are pieces of time.”
So like. That Creeley line. I am very afraid of human relationships. I want people to like me, and while I've been learning not to let it bother me when people don't for whatever reason, I still fear disappointing people. I have an image of myself as a quiet observer—like Isherwood's camera—that I never fulfill because I have a need for connection that I can't shake and a tendency to get silly or overly involved with the central action in the room. I'm shy, but I want attention. I feel bad for eons whenever I fuck up with someone, even if that fuck-up has barely anything to do with me. Human relationships scare me because they are fraught and inevitably one party hurts the other, and often the wounds are just left to linger and fester rather than heal. The arcs of the relationships we build with each other rarely feel complete.
This movie speaks to that fleeting, unresolved nature of human connection. How wants and needs go unfulfilled, promises unmet, feelings left unspoken. Kaili Blues is a little too nebulous for me to say it's about the specifics of interpersonal drama between characters, but it is deeply concerned with humanity, if I can get away with saying that again.
Bi's answer to the loose threadedness of life, insofar as there is an answer, is something of the reverse of the famous phrase from William Faulker's Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It speaks to the essential quality of the present: Everything within time as unattainable as it is universal. If that makes any sense at all.
“Kaili Blues is prefaced with a quote from the Diamond Sutra to the effect that Everything is Now,” Hoberman goes on. “Past thought cannot be retained, future thought cannot be grasped, and present thought cannot be held. Go with the flow. It’s a fair warning.”
Kaili Blues moves strangely, poetically. Guillermo del Toro said in a tweet that the movie is “a geography of the soul. Delineated by time, trains and regret.”
The loose plot follows a doctor named Chen who goes on a journey in search of his nephew Wei wei, as Chen's half-brother Crazy Face may have sold him into servitude to a clockmaker. “Chen [then] drifts into a mysterious village called Dangmai, in which the past, present, and future mix together,” the Wikipedia article describes.
“This is a film that proceeds on its own terms,” K. Austin Collins writes for Reverse Shot, “punctuated with daydreams, memories and long interludes in which we hear poetry written by the director.” In-universe the poetry is Chen's, but the relationship between director and subject is blended here.
The first hour or so of the movie is spent in Kaili, a southwestern Chinese city of almost half a million people, although here it feels sparse and rural. We follow Chen's day-to-day activities, his interactions with the older female doctor with whom he runs a clinic, as well as his interactions with his half-brother. He takes his nephew to an amusement park. He visits his mother's grave, only to find that Crazy Face moved it without telling him. Wei wei draws a clock on a wall.
Scenes drift, and there's an unreality to each of them. Everything is wet. There are a strange amount of caves. And increasingly there are indications that what's being depicted on screen isn't literal, first with a TV playing in what appears to be a cave and later more solidly punctuated with a scene where a train is projected upside down in Crazy Face's dank, dark home.
“Everywhere there are clocks and trains, symbols of predictability and time, and of journeys executed on a closed circuit,” Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said in an AV Club review. “Presumably, this is the journey of a mind haunted by loss, abandonment, and regret.”
A big technical draw of the film is the 41-minute long take following Chen through his journey in the small village of Dangmai, which apparently means “Secret location” in the Miao language. There's food, extended motorbike rides, a haircut, bad singing, kind strangers, and characters who may or may not be from the past or the future. It's a gorgeous and sad journey fraught with the various tragedies of human relationships.
One extremely good essay called “Poetics and the Periphery: The Journey of Kaili Blues” by Jiwei Xiao and Dudley Andrew shows how Bi Gan imitated the forms of Chinese lyric poetry on film.
“Bi Gan believes that he can reproduce poetry’s oral rhythm in his camerawork and editing so as to delve into personal pasts and the cultural unconscious,” Xiao and Andrew explain.
They go on to break down an early episode in the movie, where Chen's older female coworker Guanglian is giving Chen a cupping treatment, which is meant to help with relaxation and improve blood flow, with Chen on his back as Guanglian applies the suction cups.
“The beauty of Kaili Blues is never skin deep,” they said. “A small episode of everyday interaction like this between two human beings, involving neither kinship nor sexual relations, leads to a profound convergence of affection and spirit.”
But there's a sad or maybe failed side to these relationships too. One sideplot (and there are many) concerns Chen's mission to find a man who Guanglian once knew many years ago, who she made a promise to and never kept. By the time Chen locates the man, he finds out he's already dead.
A boy who drives a motorbike taxi and who may or may not be a manifestation of Wei wei in the future chases after a girl who wants to be a tour guide in Kaili. Chen gets a haircut from a woman who may or may not be a manifestation of his wife from the past, and his story about his life visibly rattles her. A brief early scene shows how Chen never sang to his wife when she wanted him to, so he (badly) sings a children's song at an outdoor concert to this woman. It's unclear if such attempts to posthumously right relationships are enough. Maybe it doesn't matter.
“Extending a popular Chinese adage, 'every encounter is also a reunion,'” Xiao and Andrew say, rather cryptically, “Bi Gan declares in one of Chen Sheng’s poems that 'reunion is a dark room.'”
Kaili Blues can be streamed for free on Kanopy through most U.S. library systems.
Bryan tweets at @BryanOnion.