是日访古 「Shi ri fang gu」
Release Date: 2024
Duration: 19 mins.
Director: Lin Yihan
Writer: Lin Yihan (Screenplay),
Starring: Fu Yunfei,
Lin Yihan’s short Sojourn to Shangri-la starts out as a workplace comedy where a fashion shoot falls apart after an elaborate beach-side structure, from which a model was meant to emerge, vanishes into the sea. Then it turns into something transcendental.
Amidst the developing disaster of the delayed production is assistant art director Cal (Fu Yunfei) who dashes between bored models, a disrespectful cinematographer, and a distraught director, all of whom are waiting for her to find the installation so filming can start. She is our “in” into this journey. We get snippet scenes from different parts of the stalled production and, tying everything together, Cal keeping her cool while all those around her lose theirs.
A quasi-mockumentary feel is established via the use of a handheld camera and the rawness of varied shots of on-set malaise of cast and crew milling about to quickly-glimpsed on-set squabbles as tempers curdle due to an importunate sense of time and money being lost.
There is a bruising sort of entertainment in seeing egotistic people pull rank on each other and give in to pettiness and mini-meltdowns but cynical workplace humour is eschewed as the sense of something strange lingering on the periphery is developed. In creating this, director Lin intuitively and imaginatively uses a wide cinematic toolset to suggest the supernatural impinging on the fashion shoot to exciting effect.
It begins with the cutaways to strange POV shots that feel like they belong to creatures sometimes lurking in the surf, sometimes in the sky. Models idly lounging at makeup stations in a forest grove will talk of hearing strange noises. The view of a camera lazily watching the confusion on set will dart to the tree canopy to track the sudden sound of animal cries. Then attention will always re-focus on the people on set. The net effect of these moments is that the film is constantly slipping from normality into the eerie and back to the regular. It creates the feeling that something is “peeking” at this event with some cheeky interest.
Indeed, at first, we are sure that the intervention of nature and human hubris has derailed the shoot as we watch people squabble over tide patterns and overtime costs of recovering the structure, but gradually a thrilling sense of the uncanny builds, the effect of which is heightened by Lin’s choice to shoot in black and white which adds a sense of timelessness, due to connotations of age, as well as a look of ethereality.
Once Cal gets her hands on a drone camera, the landscape really roars into life as a character as the camera soars over the coast and its overwhelming scale and possibility for mystery are felt through God-like overhead shots of where the missing structure should be. This is a long sequence where the constant sight of undulating waves have a hypnotic effect through the constancy of patterns and how relaxing they are. It helps a viewer’s mind ascend into some higher state alongside Cal who, as she operates the drone, seems to transcend the film set and look down on Earth and humanity and even interacts with others through odd sounds.
While the ending might be filled with the weird, the mythic, and unexpected (and maybe incomprehensible for some), the film feels like it really achieves a sense of the transcendental as it cycles up through Cal’s experiences while also playing on her surroundings and it is a lot of fun to watch along the way. Soothing even.
Underlining the action on screen is the idea of landscapes outlasting humanity and there are echoic visual motifs to constantly remind us of this. Consider how minor the turmoil of the fashion shoot is in the grand scheme of things – the sight of tiny humans on a huge landscape. Some shots of activity on set are minus people, though their voices can be heard. The camera pans across a beach. Shots of human footprints in the sands, the waves lapping at them, sure to fade.
Then there is a sense of time, the flow of which Lin manipulates with different scene lengths so it can be viscerally felt expanding and shrinking with such strength that it becomes an ever-nagging presence that frays at the edge of the story. It suggests that whatever troubles are happening now, they will pass.
There is something reassuring in that constancy and if transcendental beings are present or not, they still fit in with this atmosphere and Cal’s cool-headedness in the face of the panic of others furthers this feeling. By the end, I felt contemplative and peaceful.
Indeed, Sojourn to Shangri-la achieves a special feeling. Away from mortal concerns, amidst sights and sounds of nature, shots of time and tide, are spectres and the invisible presence of something more eternal. It is a delight. The sort of experience to get your brain buzzing as it slips in and out of the weird, the supernatural, and reminds us that there is more to the world than human activity.
Sojourn to Shangri-la was screened at Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024.
You can read my interview with director Lin Yihan here.