The Chinese director of Hmong ethnicity, born in 1989, Bi Gan is undoubtedly one of the most important filmmakers of his generation, and certainly one with a more recognizable authorial imprint. His style is evocative and dreamlike, far from any commercial canon. Inspired by the masterpieces of Tarkovsky (it seems that the young man decided to pick up the camera after watching Stalker), his is a tactile cinema, made of sensations. One that must be physically experienced: “My movie is like a heavy rain, but there’s no need to bring umbrellas.” A deeply empirical, disturbing and head-spinning type of work.
This becomes evident from the international success of Kaili Blues (2015), which made him known to the international public after being awarded at the Locarno Film Festival. The film places the director in the niche of essay masterpieces, as it remains faithful to his strictly personal vision, which looks to some great names of the past, including Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Wong Kar-wai, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but actually interprets reality in a new way. Free from any form of schematism, Bi Gan uses a visionary and dreamlike language – almost like a distant surreal memory – that translates into one word: poetry. The director (also a poet) writes audiovisual poems.
Whether it’s a man who – between forgetting and remembering – continuously dreams of a mysterious woman and searches for her (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018) – or an ex-convict doctor searching for his nephew (Kaili Blues, 2015), or the story of three men caught between the past and fate (Tiger, 2011), his works reflect on time. A concept that is dismantled, in the construction of a sort of experimental road movie, in which the characters are in search of something physical, but actually metaphysical.
Like A Short Story, short film was released in 2022 and is now available on Mubi. In 15 minutes, the Chinese director is able to create an audiovisual journey that is nothing more than a fairy tale, rich in metaphors and allegories.
The protagonist is a black cat, without friends, without a home, and without a purpose, who embarks on a trip after a scarecrow entrusts him with the task of answering a question: “What is the most precious thing in the world?”. Thus, with a dark overcoat and a hat – the clothes of the scarecrow now on fire – the mysterious feline will wander incognito through the world to answer it.
He will encounter three characters. The first is a robot that produces magical candies for children leaving the orphanage, with a taste that is a bit bitter, a bit sour (and a bit sweet, but “a cat is by nature insensitive to the sweet. Black cat left the orphanage with a mouthful of bitter and sour tastes”). The second is a young woman who, in order to forget that she has lost her lover, eats a plate of amnesia noodles every day and leaves behind a forgotten letter, which the cat considers a senseless play on words. It is a poem from a distant time: “In addition to the distant sun, my writing tonight is by far inspired by the weather, the pollution, as well as the suspended particles in the air. Kids are in their deepest of dreams. Kids are running wild in the density of blue. I plan on teaching them arithmetic. A flower adds another, a flower is a trumpet flower. A beetle deducts another beetle, and turns into a caterpillar. My heart is bubbly hot when I’m not writing. The same as when I think of you. I imagine. Love of mankind is at the core of the sun. The sole energy source of the Solar.”
The third encounter will be with the Demon and constitutes the most stylistically surprising stylistic moment, truly “magical”. The magician agrees to answer the question in exchange for the sacrifice of a piece of the requester’s soul: “the Demon said that by the time the sun went, Black Cat’s hat will take a note of his soul”. The cat will receive a ball of dirt to keep under his hat, from which a little girl on her birthday, at sunset, will pluck a piece of soul: a daisy.
Thus ends A Short Story, a surreal synergy of magical (or animistic) sensations that clearly echo a Lynchian atmosphere. It seems like a post-modern explosion of poetry unfolding in different places. Like a feline Pinocchio, the protagonist delves into “the land of toys”, which is a sort of open-air arcade.
Another new version of the world according to Bi Gan, in a short film that should not be understood or analysed, but rather experienced with your soul and your flesh.
Leave the brain out.
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