Duration as both pain and comion. The ease with which this sustains its misery over 4 hours is terrifying, and so is how in tune writer/director Hu Bo was with the material conditions and psychology of suffering. Before tragically taking his own life shortly after finishing this film (his first and last) he cited this line from Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses as inspiration:

“He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.” 

So, yes, the act of this film’s creation is likely in some ways inextricable from its filmmakers fate; the oppressive shallow focus and deliberate movements of the close-ups/tracking shots acquire a sense of motion with no destination, a humiliating and uncomfortable hopelessness that at first ed a bit juvenile and repetitive but deepened for me as it went along.

What some I think however are missing by reading this simply and solely as an exercise in cinematically rendering the director’s headspace are 1) how big this feels, its sprawling structure implying something beyond individual experience almost akin to the mournful apocalyptic wanderings of Bela Tarr that are so filled with feeling they are imbued in the surroundings, and 2) its eventual turn to reveal something strangely cathartic about the nature of that scope, that shared, historical pain.

Characters here walk through their “wasteland” with hunched shoulders and resigned expressions, a mournful musical motif hovers as their lives begin to crumble around them at an agonizing pace—a brief tracking shot that reveals a recently deceased relative and how geographically close their unknowing family were is horrifying—but there’s something unique and special about the unbearable length and cutting here (Hu Bo edited the film as well), a formal desire for more time with its characters, more time for them to find something new or maybe just find each other.

“New place, new suffering” is a phrase repeated in the film however the destination suggests a possibility that we haven’t seen everything yet. So we might as well look.