[BEHEMOTH screens Thursday March 23rd at 6:45 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

But then there
was Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang's documentary-expose
BEHEMOTH. Better reviews than the Howard film, too. The French co-production pontificates – mostly in visuals, shot by
Zhao himself - on the environmental/spiritual devastation wrought by China's
rapid industrial progress.
Borrowing chapter
headings and sparse narration from Dante's Divine Comedy, Zhou’s striking,
otherwise non-narrative feature (original title “Bei Xi Mo Shou”) depicts
hellish moonscapes and rapacious underground coal-mining operations in Mongolia.
Verdant green hillsides and grazing cattle here show up starkly side-by-side
with miles of spreading, lifeless, rubble-strewn waste.
Peasant
laborers and miners who supposedly benefit from all this instead die from lung
disorders, and the final act presents an ironic vision of Dante's
"paradise" in terms of the gleaming, almost entirely empty
"ghost cities" built in the Chinese hinterlands, high-rise boomtowns
for the new civilian prosperity that never happened.
From time to time
also a performance-artist type with a mirror wanders the landscapes, and
digital special f/x are dropped in during the esoteric, subtitled
poetry-narration. These are pretentious and distracting; more understandable
are the juxtapositions of the stoic worker’s lined, worn faces, and the
grieving families in soot-covered hovels when the men succumb to respiratory failure
induced by inhaling coal dust.
Of course, “behemoth”
is a ravenous monster in the Bible, comparable I suppose to King Kong (and not
in a good way). Here the concept is reborn/Born Again, in the notion that
behemoth is China’s outsized, all-devouring industrial progress, along with the
illusory economic "miracle" it has brought the people. One that looks
here like a pretty bad deal.
Though Shanghai
billionaires and Trump appointees/supporters may look at the dead lands and the
dying workers and wonder what all the fuss is about. Perhaps BEHEMOTH will be a
bit more accessible when someone does a US remake after our environmental
regulations get repealed. For once, the concept of an English-language do-over
might have merit, alas. (3 out of 4 stars)
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