Chinese Portrait

“Chinese Portrait” is a great art installation, but a thoroughly unsatisfying film.

Not that this documentary/still life meant to show a changing China was made without skill — the great Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai is behind the camera — but this is art house arrogance run amok. That the viewer can walk away from this 79minute movie having not learned one thing about China almost ranks as some sort of odd achievement.

Here’s the idea: Wang (“Beijing Bicycle”), a wonderful filmmaker who has made movies I love, spent seven years off and on traveling around China gathering shots that capture everyday life. His strategy is to compose a stationary shot, often posing someone in the foreground and having them awkwardly stare into the camera, and let the shot run for a minute or two. Followed by another. And another. That’s it.

So look at one of the film stills accompanying this review. Now imagine looking at that film still on a big screen for two minutes. And doing that over and over for an hour and 20 minutes. Beyond that, and this is most frustrating of all, there is no context — no hint of where these scenes were shot.

There are some lovely, skillfully composed shots in factories, on farms, on seashores, in urban smog, in industrial wastelands, in private living spaces, on trains, and so forth. I had to scour the internet to find out that Wang shot in Beijing and Shanghai, but also in more remote areas, such as the Qinhai province in the northwest, which has a large Tibetan population, and many more.

Why do I have to do that? Wouldn’t I have a better picture of China if I knew where these scenes took place while watching the film?

I get what Wang is trying to do. The film is meditative. By offering such shots consecutively, without embellishment or comment, Wang is hoping that perhaps a varied and complex view of

China will form in your mind. But I craved more.

It’s frustrating, because I got what I wanted in the official trailer by Cinema Guild for the American release. The twominute trailer artfully juxtaposes shots as a hypnotic, deepfeeling narration — possibly recorded specifically for this trailer, because it is not in the film — in which Wang, who is 53, wonders what has become of his China and where he fits in the new China.

That’s the kind of context that the featurelength version sorely needed.

Cinema Guild photos Wang Xiaoshuai captures stationary shots of everyday life in the documentary “Chinese Portrait,” shot throughout the country during the past seven years.

“Chinese Portrait” provides no context for scenes like the one pictured. With many such shots, the filmmaker poses someone in the foreground and lets the shot run for a minute or two.