Tragedy looms over the epically depressive debut/swan song An Elephant Sitting Still
Roughly midway through hour one of the four-hour Chinese anti-epic An Elephant Sitting Still, one of the main characters, a high school student, passes another kid in the hall. “The world is a wasteland,” this other student says, apropos of nothing whatsoever. At the time, this grim non sequitur merely seems weird;…