On February 16, 2018, a 230-minute film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and won the Fibisi International Film Critics Award at the 68th Berlin Film Festival. On November 17, 2018, the film won the 55th Golden Horse Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, and the audience voted for the most popular film. On 6 May 2020, "Elephant Sitting on the Ground" (hereinafter referred to as "Elephant") won the Best Asian Chinese Film at the 39th Hong Kong Film Awards.
Unfortunately, the film's director Hu Bo (pen name Hu Qian) passed away on October 12, 2017.
What story does Elephant tell?
The film is adapted from a short story of the same name from director Hu Qian's "The Great Rift". The content of the film is shortened to the extreme: four frustrated and troubled people heard that there was an elephant in Manchuria and sat there all day, so they decided to travel from Hebei to Manchuria to see the elephant.
Which four people, how did they meet?
Huang Ling (left) Webb (right)
In order to help his friend get rid of the school bullying, Webb accidentally pushed the bully boy down the stairs and into the ICU. The boy's brother is a small in the city, and he is afraid of revenge on the city, so he hides everywhere and wants to go to Manchuria to see the legendary elephant.
Huang Ling is a classmate of Webb's. She and her mother had a bad relationship, but gradually developed an improper relationship with the deputy director of the school, and the scandal between the two spread throughout the school. On the verge of collapse, she agreed to follow her friend Webb to Manchuria.
Yu Cheng (right)
Mixed head. He slept with his friend's wife and was bumped into by a friend who came home, and his friend was momentarily stimulated to jump off the building. He felt that it was not his responsibility to hide the truth and at the same time wanted to go to Manchuria to avoid the limelight.
Wang Jin
Wang Jin is Webb's neighbor. The children wanted to send him to a nursing home on the grounds that the school district was too small to live in. By chance, the old man was involved in a dispute between Webb and Yu Cheng, coupled with his disappointment in his children, so he went to Manchuria to reminisce about the place where he was a soldier.
The world is a wasteland
At the door of the director's office, Webb met a child who said to him, "The world is a wasteland." This surrealist plot actually speaks to one of the cores of the film, the wasteland.
The Wasted Land.
This is a long poem written by the famous British poet T.S. Eliot in the early 20th century, the whole poem is heavily used, the imagery is frequent, the metaphor is deep, the overall is obscure, and the critics believe that this poem will point the spearhead to the people of Europe and the United States after World War I who are deeply trapped in the collective predicament: spiritual emptiness, lack of faith.
T.S. Elliott
In this film, the wasteland is the spiritual dilemma of the four protagonists. The four of them, from old to young, are facing the wandering and helplessness of life. This kind of spiritual dilemma comes from many aspects, there are family factors, there are school violence factors, there are love factors, four people have made their own struggles to varying degrees, but the final result is deeply hit, lost in the same wasteland.
flee
The four of them were lost in the wilderness, emptiness and confusion engulfing their hearts, and at this time, a sudden news from afar was particularly desirable.
There is an elephant in Manchuria, and it has been sitting there, and it may have been stuck with a fork, or it may have liked to sit there, and then everyone would run over and hold the railing to see, and someone would throw something to eat, and it would ignore it.
The four learned that there was a strange elephant in the distance, which was trapped, but it did not pay attention to the world around it, so the four decided to go to Manchuria to see the elephant.
It's an "escape" for four people, in English: RUNAWAY.
Alice Monroe
This is a representative novella by Nobel laureate Alice Monroe, which uses a broken, confusing fragmented narrative to drive the plot forward, telling the story of Carla who is terrified of the uncertainty of the future and decides to run away from her husband, but twice she finally chooses to return to her husband, showing the confusion and confusion of growing up.
The four chose to go to Manchuria for the sake of an ethereal elephant, in fact because of the escape from reality, they desperately wanted to leave this place, hoped to come to a new environment, as if everything would be better, they could have a new beginning, find their salvation. But reality is not always what people wish, and those ethereal visions are sometimes just a source of self-consolation, so that our lives are barely able to survive.
Kick the shuttlecock
The car keeps driving, and we also come to the end of the film, the car stops to rest in the dark night, and a group of five people (Wang Jin brought his granddaughter) get out of the car to kick the shuttlecock to relieve the fatigue. At this time, from the distance, the deep night came the hiss of elephants, resounding through the ears, echoing endlessly, and the crowd stood silent. At this point, the film ends.
Did the Webbs find what they were looking for?
Instead of asking, I think it's okay to do it another way.
Have we found the ending we want to see?
It's hard to say, but at least Hu Qian left us hope at the end of the film. Strangely enough, I can often draw strength from some dark and desperate emotions to face a new day of life.
Live, not survive.
It is very interesting that the film does not mention why the elephant sits on the ground, in fact, at the end of the novel of the same name, the protagonist discovers that the elephant is lame on its hind legs and simply cannot stand up, so it "almost laughs out" and is trampled to death by the elephant.