What a difference an authoritarian regime makes: to Western cinephiles, Jia Zhang-Ke is quite possibly the most well-regarded of Chinese filmmakers (certainly, he is by far the most important Sixth Generation filmmaker), while in China his works are tolerated as much as they are celebrated. Case in point: his fifth feature, Still Life, despite winning the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, was chastised by Zhang Hong-Sen, the director of the State Film Bureau, for being insufficiently warm and caring towards workers, and the film was rushed out of theaters to make way for more rousing, patriotic works.

That seems like bizarre complaint to make about a film that comes across as humane as Still Life does, but it fits, kind of. The actual title translates, so I am told, as Good People of Three Gorges, which seems to imply a much more "hurrah for the working class" plot than the film turns out to possess. Insofar as it possesses a plot at all. Which it really doesn't, giving us instead a somewhat rambling study of two people who are in much the same situation, except for all of the tiny ways that their situations are different, and one of them, as far as I can recall, is never given a name. So in fairness, this is really the kind of film that state film programs - even those in European countries - tend to look down upon.

The film takes place in the town of Fengjie, located on the Yangtze River on the edge of the Three Gorges region. Some quick history: the completion of the controversial Three Gorges Dam in 2006 - right about the time the movie was shot! - led to the creation of the Three Gorges Reservoir, covering many villages and cities and archaeological sites under a very large amount of water. This was known, and in the time leading up to the dam's completion, the government oversaw a massive relocation effort to bring all of the population living in the gorges above the new water level, effectively destroying cities and rebuilding them on higher ground. Still Life takes place in the final days of Fengjie: water is already lapping at the lowest parts of the city, and the only industry that seems to remain active is the demolition of every standing building.

Certainly, Jia uses this setting to great effect, but it would be entirely wrong to say that the movie is "about" the evacuation of Three Gorges. Rather, it is about two people who arrive in Fengjie around the same time, hoping to find their past in a city whose past is about to be destroyed: first we meet a coal miner (Han Sanming), looking for his estranged wife and their daughter, missing for 16 years. He very quickly falls in with the local workers, and helps them to tear down what's left of the city while he looks. After a long time following this man, the film shifts over to Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), a nurse looking for her husband, absent a much shorter two years. Their two stories gentle weave in and out, never intersecting but always feeling very much part of a complete whole. And it is actually about Three Gorges, too, but in an elliptical way that I don't like to think about too hard in case I break it.

So much for plot. Still Life does not function as a narrative; I am not certain what it does function as, although it functions very well indeed. This is a film of spaces and people moving within spaces, containing some of the most inerrant, beautiful compositions you will see in a theater this year, and a camera that moves almost constantly through very deliberately laid tableaux, through balletic choreography that you only realise is entirely preordained once it's finished. All of Jia's films (that I've seen) are at least somewhat concerned with the relationship between physical space and human bodies (hence the seemingly inevitable comment that his work is overwhelmingly reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni), but I'm not certain that I've seen him use camera movements and medium shots in concert to achieve that affect so beautifully - like the Chinese government, I've found his previous films to be a bit chilly, but Still Life moves with a fluidity that is as enveloping as a dream.

I'm going to give up: I'd been hoping to avoid using the word "dream" as too vague and helpless, but Still Life is not an easy film to pin down. It all seems very simple when you're watching it, and it sticks in the mind more as sensations and images than a concrete object to be sliced apart and dissected. It's all about nostalgia, memory, loss, things that are entirely in the head, and the movie itself is like those things, easier to feel than to explain. I think it will be best if I cut myself off before I embarrass myself any further by concluding: this is a beautiful film in every sense of that word, and though it is as slow as anything you're likely to see, it is the slowness not of boredom, but of a trance.

Fun game: come up with as many meanings for "Still Life" as you can. I found three:

-An image of an inanimate scene
-Life that is calm and unchanging
-Life that has not yet ceased to be life

All of which make for a much better title than Good People of Three Gorges. If I may say so.