The film started with a director looking at an action film shooting site,the illuminating huangpu river background,foreign staffs and even the pretensious acting all indicated a nouveau riche like industry.Later we knew,this director,as our protagonist,were stucking in distress.He want to make a film but the fund and script problem hanging there like a ghost.There is this scene,he asked his actress girl friend who were shooting the long march in front of a green screen to coorperate in his film,then,only to met a cold shoulder.I'm kind of impressed by the way the story laid out,using limited dialogues and scenes to express the relation and situation.But when you followed the crew to the forest,things got blurred and uncorrelated. In fact,this film got piles of allusions and implication that I almost felt it's a notebook of not telling you anything.
Alone the way from the big city to county then to the village,what they encountered become raw,plain even mysterious.Local officials indulged in drinking practice,pig being slaugtered in the yard,silent tour group meditated in cave.The story are supposed to follow the journey of this film crew but what was actually depicting is the foating dynamics of men and women.Everyone express their feeling or affection indirectly.Producer,direcctor,actor,cinema photographer,each character has saturated personality that lightening the tedious marching..A widow suddenly apeared and showed huge egerness to the director when they're interacting.Certain scenes were so mataphoric that they somehow lost continuity.Manifold subtexts makes the film interesting to analyze,on the other hand,it take huge patience to watch their journey.Nothing actually happened between them beside the funeral.They finally heard The Tales of Darkness.
Overall,the film has multifarious matephors and great cinema language that derserve some applause,these qualities scaresly apear in domestic film.But when it comes to acutal watching experience,one may find it challenging to resist the hypnosis.
