Routine Holiday tracks a series of low-key events in the lives of city dwellers who are apparently unable to cope with free time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pull off the task of making boredom entertaining. There are only occasional flashes of the black humour of Roy Andersson’s You, the Living, shown in last year’s London Film Festival, with static frames of glum-faced characters, dim lighting and a mournful musical score. The random plot and soundtrack bleeps recall Mid-afternoon Barks, Zhang Yuedong’s’ 2007 absurdist portrait of creeping urbanization, but lacks its witty appeal. A march-past of uniformed children is a reminder of Wang Xiaoshuai’s 1993 film, The Days, a dismal portrait of city life for artists in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, but Routine Holiday’s social critique is obscure.

The film plot consists of a series of incidents after shabbily dressed Tuo Ga (Yang Bo) meets an old friend, dourly played by Duo Yu, on a bus. He invites the glum former classmate and his slow-witted son, played by Gao Sui, to his minimally furnished flat. Tuo's struggles to make conversation with his taciturn guest, and although this and his efforts to borrow a cup from a reluctant neighbour have a comic appeal, the pace is tediously slow.

The touches of humour are oblique and often derived from bizarre images: a bride and groom wearing bedraggled angel wings board a bus; two men play rooftop chess with only three pieces; a plastic-wrapped pre-cooked chicken is the gift Tuo’s guest presents to his host. Some statements seem absurd, as when a listless husband proclaims a sudden urge to have an affair or when two doctors slowly speculate about a ‘patient’ lying on the ground, perhaps fallen from a building. A boy plunges his arm into a plastic bucket, provoking squawks from within. On a dark street, a father with a torch removes his daughter from the arms of a young man and mildly scolds him. People answer the phone with silence and ignore what is said to them. Even a domestic blaze is extinguished without haste or comment.

Routine Holidays makes for challenging viewing, but fails to entertain or instruct. In seeming to indict modern China’s drawbacks, it could be a metaphor for lives without meaning, a protest about environmental drabness, a complaint about lack of leisure facilities, observations on the loss of social cohesion or indeed all of these things. Unfortunately it only succeeds in exasperating those members of the audience who stay in their seats to the very end – resembling, perhaps, Li’s mesmerised protagonists.

Routine Holiday was screened in the 2008 London Film Festival