The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, on China’s Yangtze Basin, has displaced more than 1 million people and at least one 2,000-year-old town to yield a record-breaking hydropower system capable of producing 84.68 billion kilowatts/hour. It’s an unprecedented feat and pretty much the biggest metaphor since the Titanic — something perhaps only the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke and his continually surprising talents could handle.

A half-demolished portion of the Fengjie district, set to be flooded by this gargantuan project, is the backdrop to the superb “Still Life,” which opens today at the IFC Center. Mr. Jia’s most exquisitely wrought look yet at the upheaval caused by China’s growth is a subtly breathtaking work, the twinned tale of separate visitors to the soon-to-be-waterlogged area. It blends an unassuming naturalism with playful artifice and startling documentary-like glimpses of change, the terrible beauty of it all rendered in breathtaking compositions at once painterly and gritty.

In the spectacular but intimate opening, Mr. Jia’s camera scrolls slowly past a boatload of workers and other passengers on their way to Fengjie — a warm offhand mural of humanity set to traditional song. “Still Life” won’t strive for effect quite like this again, but remains just as accomplished, and these initial sketches of people gambling, shifting seats, laughing, and zoning out signal Mr. Jia’s implicit compassion for the folks onscreen, no matter how fearsomely overwhelmed by shifts in the physical and social landscape.

Sanming (Han Sanming), a stocky little miner from the country, is one visitor fresh off the boat who has come to find the wife who absconded to Fengjie 16 years ago. He looks dazed, an easy mark for the touts who hustle him to a magic show (in which blank paper is turned into euros), but he proves resilient. Picking through a town that’s a rubble-strewn mix of whole and sheared-open buildings, he finds work with a demolition crew (naturally) and eventually rediscovers his smile while trading cell phone jingles with a slight new friend who mimics the Chinese actor Chow Yun-Fat.

Sanming makes do, in an apocalyptic environment that recalls the neorealist films of postwar Italy — except this act of dismantling is ongoing. It’s the very image of a society being rehauled, and faster than people can keep up: “Still Life” is scattered with bumper scenes of a middle-aged landlord yelling at an official who spray paints a demolition order on his building, a woman leaning on her monolithic balcony with a saline drip, and brushes with workers and citizens as they argue with corrupt managers in woefully dated expectations of justice. Likewise, when Sanming visits his wife’s last known address, it’s underwater.

Like the ceaseless march of progress it depicts, “Still Life” keeps cruising ahead, conveying how human incident gets swept along in the tide. The movie trapezes temporarily from Hanming to another bereft protagonist, Shen Hong (Tao Zhao), a nurse tracking down a husband who left her not for another woman so much as for business. Her experience, and her ultimate encounter with the distracted ex-lover, evokes the frightening sense of emotional and even spiritual freefall produced by churning “progress.” It’s the anything-goes of a world being remade, like 19th-century America without the bedrock of ideals — instead, only concrete and cash.

The distance separating the former couple is echoed when Hanming finds his wife, indentured on a ship. They sit across from each other, exhausted; she automatically, unthinkingly, offers to find him another wife. It’s a profoundly sobering moment, but there is reassurance in Hanming’s desire to reconnect, and Mr. Jia never treats Hanming or Shen Hong as disposably emblematic victims, only people, albeit often numbed into silence. (Sanming is stolidly played by Han Sanming, originally a nonprofessional and now a Jia regular, like Ms. Tao.)

The work of cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, shooting in high-definition digital video, is key to “Still Life” and its careful drift of figures in a landscape. The film moves imperceptibly between a flattened image that slides human beings into their shattered environment, and the tantalizing, evanescent mountainside that looms behind the construction flotsam and mushroom-like bunches of institutional housing. Our sense of horizon is, by turns, there and, anxiously, not there, from one shot to the next.

Mr. Jia further tinges his realism in his films with whimsical flourishes, and “Still Life” is no different. The unreality of large-scale change is brought out in one scene by an actual collapsing building in the distant background, and in another, one of Mr. Jia’s overlaid animations, surprising but fitting, sends a temple rocketing into space. A series of enigmatic, semi-symbolic word marks appear throughout the film in the screen’s lower right-hand corner — cigarettes, toffee, liquor — as punctuation. (One critic has posited that Mr. Jia is playing on a traditional Chinese litany of provisions: fuel, rice, cooking oil, and salt.)

“Still Life” balances elements from across Mr. Jia’s past work, which, with the shift in focus away from the young, makes it his most successful and distinctive film for its particular alchemy. It gets the anomie of his ’90s films without drowning, and finds a visual scheme more eloquent than the translucent glitz of his last drama, 2005’s “The World,” which was overwhelmed by its metaphoric location, a Vegas-like town of replica landmarks. Veteran of more than a dozen festivals (and winner of the Golden Lion at Venice), “Still Life” has finally wended its way to theaters here, and rises to the top of the must-see list of this young year.