Kaili Blues (2015), the debut film of Bi Gan, is a meandering paradox.

It is a film in which
very little happens in each shot, but nonetheless manages to tell the stories of several
lives. It is a tale of searchings and farewells, a poetic meditation on village life, set in
mountainous Southwest China.

The story is told in two distinct part – first, we meet Chen, a doctor in a small clinic, who
embarks on a trip to recover his nephew, Weiwei, that was sold to his former friend.
Chen’s world is a shabby one, full of seedy characters, but Bi shrouds it with beautiful
static shots, each characters’ life playing out like still life. The lighting is always soft, a
blue hue ever-present, and dialogue is minimal, almost painfully so, and if a character
speaks, it is often to tell a story. Thus, we are disoriented, shrouded in a dream.

Stepping off the train to his nephew’s village, Chen enters a mesmerising 40-minute
unbroken tracking shot. In it, he passes through a village, where he gets a haircut, eats
noodles and has shirt mended amongst other things, in the only fictional location in the
film. Thus begins the second part of the film. Those that he meets there, played
unselfconsciously by actual villagers, are familiar but strange: his deceased wife is his
hairdresser; Weiwei, appearing much older, gives him a motorbike ride; Weiwei’s
sweetheart is his colleague’s younger self. As if in a parallel universe, these characters’
double identities are puzzle pieces put together only with subsequent viewings of the
film, and are so subtle that they can easily missed by a passive viewer. Since all of this is
occurring in real time, we become keenly aware of the way Bi weaves together reality,
time, and memory.

Imperfect, but earnest, defines Bi’s style. The amateur actors are sometimes visibly
tense, and the camera is noticeably passed between cameramen during the long take.
The actors speak in a local dialect, incomprehensible to most Chinese speakers, but in
their voice, conventional pop songs become sincere professions of love, and eloquent
poetry express no pretensions. Chen, at his highest and lowest, never strays too far from
the same mundane everyday life that we all experience. This kind of realism forces the
viewer to savour emotions, and not drama.

Once Chen exits the dreamscape of the long take, we are back to the static and slightly
less muted world of reality. He is back on a train, going backwards, and with this returns
Bi’s use of the frame inside his shots. When not in the fictional village, many scenes play
out through windows of houses and vehicles, doorways, and mirrors, distancing the
audience so that somehow Chen’s dreamscape seems more visceral than his real life.
Rivers, roads and time flow ceaselessly throughout, for Chen and for us. Bi reminds the
audience, with quiet sentimentality, the way that we spend our lives searching for
nothing at all.