muvies

三峡好人

三峡好人, Sān Xiá hǎorén, "Three Gorges Good People", English title: Still Life.

Really liked this. Very slow, beautiful, fascinating, funny, touching. Some say boring and depressing, but I don't. When I watched it I was very sleep-deprived but I didn't fall asleep, though I noticed others around me dozing off. Nice music. Good subtitling job.

Linguistic note: it took me a long time to decipher the characters for the Chinese title. I'm an idiot, because three of them even I knew since they're among the 50 first characters you learn when studying Chinese. The one that had me stumped, 峡, has a mountain 山 in it, also an extremely common character. Let's see... "Three Mountain-something Good People"? The Chinese title of a movie about two people looking for loved ones in the setting of the Three Gorges Dam area? Nope, no idea what that mountain-character could mean. I guess I could try blaming simplified characters. The traditional form 峽 combines 山 and 夾, which a represents a person squeezed between two other people, and not coincidentally means "be wedged or inserted between." So this was a seriously guessable character, for once, but no, I had to go find the characters in non-image form on Wikipedia, then look the title up on the wonderful mdbg.net and zhongwen.com.

Anyway, this is a fine movie.