The 26-year-old writer and director Bi Gan’s debut feature, “Kaili Blues,” which opens at Metrograph in New York City on May 20, is an imprecise, sui generis mystery filmed in China’s Guizhou province that sleepwalks to the drifting rhythms of poetry instead of prose. Some of Bi’s own verse appears in the film, and when I asked him over email if poetry or filmmaking came first, he corrected me. “I became a poor poet first,” he said. Either way, there is a distinct connection between the two disciplines. “Film is like eyes and the poetry is like nose,” he said, epigrammatically. “But both are expressed by the mouth.” Bi’s first published book of poetry shares an English title, “Roadside Picnic,” with a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that was later adapted for film by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky as “Stalker” (1979). And it’s easy to see Tarkovsky’s influence in the way “Kaili Blues” plays with time, dream, and memory. But Bi is reluctant to put too much emphasis on the relationship. “‘Stalker’ enlightens my film art; it may only have a kind of spiritual connection,” he said. “Andrei Tarkovsky gives me a pair shoes, but I have to walk by myself.”If “Kaili Blues” proves anything, it’s that Bi is certainly walking alone. Despite critics reaching for comparisons — many have linked him to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, or my own attempt here to draw parallels between his work and that of Tarkovsky — his film both looks and feels different than anything else around. “Kaili Blues” works with a light sketch of a plot about a former criminal named Chen Sheng (played by the director’s uncle, Chen Yongzhong), who now owns a medical clinic in the titular town and discovers that his half-brother named Crazy Face (Xie Lixun) might have sold his young nephew Wei Wei to a watchmaker. On his journey deep into the province, Chen’s focus begins to fracture —the search for his nephew is also a search for the memory of Chen’s ex-wife Zhang Xi, and the desire to find the former lover of Guanglin, his co-worker at the clinic.“The structure of the script was very clear and included all the characters,” Bi said. He mentioned that Chen’s relationship with his ex-wife, which is more detailed in the script but only hinted at in the film, is intentionally left unfocused.“When I edited the film, I found out that I did not need to explain too much, so I only kept a small part of her frame. This makes me feel like sometimes the woman is his ex-wife, and when she grew up she is [the nephew]. However, I think everything is just a coincidence. I think when you lose yourself in a film, that film could be qualified as touching.”At the center of “Kaili Blues” is a 40-plus minute shot that is as staggering and transfixing as anything witnessed in recent cinema, a moment impossible not to lose yourself in. “Before filming, we still had some budget for meals and accommodations, but when I started this long take, I ran out of the money,” Bi said about the difficulty of pulling this sequence off. “However, it’s not bad to face these problems,” he added, giving the specific example of a motorcycle broken by one of the actors in the film that they couldn’t replace, so they ended up incorporating it into the story. “I think this is more impressive, as the characters’ destiny intersects with ours.”The intersection of Bi’s real life with the world he creates on film is in some ways obvious — the use of his own family members as actors; his hometown as location — and in other ways remains mysterious. The connection is there, but it’s loose and undefined. Bi said he was working on another film, again starring Chen, this time as a “time and memory detective.” Another search, another journey, clues with a possible lack of answers. The filmmaker is, like his protagonists, searching for the meaning within the work he has created, a mystery with no path toward an answer. But the search may be all that is required. “I hope to use film to shine into the deep sea,” he added. “But just like you said, it’s in vain.”
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