‘A Short Story’ Review: Exploring Bi Gan’s latest surreal fable
Contemporary avant-garde Chinese cinema has emerged as a major form of sociopolitical protest within the context of global cinema. While most film fans are familiar with the works of Chinese directors like Jia Zhangke, Bi Gan has also solidified his place in the current discourse about new Chinese cinema through his poetic explorations of life in modern China.
Those who are familiar with Bi Gan’s earlier works already know the majesty of films like Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night. The latter, especially, attracted serious critical attention because of its radical reorganisation of Chinese filmmaking frameworks as well as the general rules of the medium. Containing a 59-minute-long unbroken 3D shot, it follows a man who returns to his hometown after a long time and searches for the woman he never really stopped loving.
After a long hiatus from filmmaking, Bi Gan returned last year with a new short film called A Short Story. Commissioned by a Chinese pet company, the film is structured as a dreamlike fable which follows the adventures of a mysterious black cat. The cat, who no longer knows what it means to have loved ones or a home, wanders from one eccentric character to the next while trying to answer an unanswerable question: “What is the most precious thing in the world?”
During a conversation with Metrograph, Bi Gan explained: “I think it’s related to my different filmmaking stages. Unlike my previous features, self or self-expression is here less important. This film, narrated from an outside perspective, still has my distinctive signature, but it is no longer a personal one. At the same time, as this short film is like a fairy tale, I chose to follow some conventions of fairy tales by directly narrating the story myself, while at the same time complementing the literary text with imaginative audiovisual flourishes. I felt that was the most fitting and concise way to film A Short Story.”
The filmmaker added: “Yes, a pet company asked me to make a film for them, so I decided to make a fairy tale from the perspective of animals and kids. I struggled a lot with how to present the soul of the black cat in the film, as it seemed impossible to achieve by simply filming a real cat. And I didn’t want to rely on any special effects. Then I remembered David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, in which Casey Affleck wears a white sheet and becomes a ghost. We decided to embody the soul of the cat in a little detective costume so that it could wander in the film, in a real sense.”
A Short Story is an endlessly fascinating commentary on the wasteland of modernity, analysing the ever-collapsing belief systems that have propped up human civilisation for centuries now. As the cat visits a robot, an amnesiac and, ultimately, the devil, he slowly realises the miserable and eternal separation between what he considers to be precious and himself. Bi Gan follows the traditions of the trick films from the silent era, constructing pure cinematic magic once again.
