Bi Gan's last project, “Long Day's Journey Into Night,” was an ambitious, 138-minute feature that became instantly iconic for a nearly hour-long tracking shot filmed entirely in 3D. His latest effort, the aptly-titled “A Short Story,” is a 15-minute cat fable commissioned by a pet company. For most other directors, this shift in focus might result in an easy paycheck or minor stylistic exercise, but Bi turns the quaint concept into a vessel for further formal experimentation. His powers are evident regardless of running time.
A Short Story is screening at Short Shorts Film Festival and Asia
The story takes on the form of a fairy tale, with Bi himself narrating the journey of a Black Cat (Guo Hua Chen; voiced by Huan Huang) who sets out to find the “most precious thing in the world” after a Scarecrow tells him he can locate it if he talks to three “weirdos” who hold the answer. The first weirdo is Bot (played by both Xie Li Zhou and Xie Li Run), a mechanical being who gives bittersweet candies to children at an orphanage. The second is a Woman (Tan Zhuo) who slurps “Losing Memory Noodles” in order to forget the tragic loss of her beloved. The third and final weirdo is “Demon” (Chen Yong Zhong), an otherworldly magician who sells pieces of his soul in the form of dirt balls.
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The questions posed are straightforward, but the fragmented campfire story narrative doesn't provide easy answers. Bi seems most concerned with the double-sided nature of life: a woman does everything she can to forget her painful memories but loses the joyous ones as well; an automaton can say only “Hello” and “Goodbye” as it hands out candies as delicious as they are harsh. By the time the credits roll, the most precious thing in the world seems both closer than ever and as unclear as it was in the first scene.
This odd quest, simultaneously gentle and unsettling, is brought to life through Bi's confident direction. Unique forced perspectives, reverse projections, hard-to-place effects, and a 4:3 aspect ratio combine to create a dreamlike experience. Closeups of the cat's eyeball are vivid to the point of being unreal, and an unbroken shot reveals that a small house is actually speeding down train tracks. The mood shifts from gloomy post-apocalypse to gentle nostalgia at the drop of a hat, and even a Lynchian sequence that has the Demon speaking backwards dialogue feels playful and cozy.
The oddball characters disorient the viewer even further. Characters like Black Cat have different physical performers and voice actors, making them hard to pin down. The juicier performances from Chen Yong Zhong and Tan Zhuo are impressive, but they never call attention to themselves. Because of this lack of vanity all around, these characters feel less performed than directly manifested from a sleepy imagination.
This is a hypnotic film that gets under your skin without you even realizing, with its surface-level simplicity obscuring just how dense every frame is. Bi knows how to create visual surprises with his camera placement alone, and he uses reflections throughout to further trick the eye. The aforementioned train tracks sequence, for example, relies on a mirror to achieve the hidden depth of a Van Eyck painting despite its relative minimalism.
Here is a work by an artist that understands cinema's ability to fully transport an audience. On paper, its narrative is quaint and sweet, but the filmmaking gives every moment a magical quality. “A Short Story” is an epic masquerading as something far smaller, and it deserves to be seen more than once so that its layers can be pulled back.
