The World (2004)

A theme park in Beijing is the central location of The World, Jia Zhangke's playful and sad story about - well, let's see - loneliness and a sense of placelessness. The theme park contains miniatures of famous symbols for different parts of the world. There's a big ben, an eifel tower, a taj mahal, a st. peter's cathedral. The location is at once cheesy and mesmerizing. The film seems to track relations situated in a globalized world where people long to be somewhere else, with somebody else. Globalization, and the dream of endless possibilities, is contrasted with a feeling of being trapped. The theme park may be too obvious a symbol for dislocalized or disoriented desires, but the film makes all of this work because it induces the place itself, the shabby theme park, with an eerie shabbiness. The theme park represents dreams (dreams about going to France, for example) but is also a very concrete place immersed in gritty working conditions and seedy human drama.

The leading characters are a couple who both work in the theme park. He is a security guard. She is a performer in a voluptuous musical group. The performer's ex comes to visit and the relationship grows increasingly hollow. The security guard tries to help migrants from his home province. The two drift apart from each other, get involved with new people, start to lead new kinds of lives - and start to nurse new dreams and new hopes. We are introduced to the dress-maker whose husband migrate to Europe and a Russian woman who seems to have been forced into prostitution. All this lends the theme park - THE WORLD - where they work with a claustrophobic atmosphere. There they are, surrounded by the world, desiring to be some place else. The world: a surrogate, a cruel joke, a miserable job. A depressing, yet still yearning, simulation.

Jia Zhangke made the very fine and dynamic Still life. He is a bold director who does not seem to fear cinematic leaps: he can go from lush romantic scenes to brutal documentary-style images in a minutes. And these leaps do not feel like cheap effect. He succeeds in telling us multi-layered stories about where we are, about our disconcerting and beautiful world. Zhangke's films - the two that I've seen - are here & now in a way that I find impressing: they are not seeking to hunt for emblematic images for our times as much as they are trying to excavate several ways of interpreting the present. The World is a slow and elusive film - I recommend it!

City of Life and Death (2009)

In the winter 1937-8 the city of Nanjing was besieged by Japan. City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan) delves into the horror of the occupation but it also tells many striking stories about human relations. Filmed in crisp b&w, the film has a feel of raw and relentless realism. It draws our attention to systematic killing and raping but it never feels exploitative in doing so. A wide-scale massacre is executed and a German manages to create a safety zone that saves many Chines soldiers and civilians. For all its brave descriptions of war-time atrocities, City of Life and Death sometimes falls into the trap of sentimentality. It tries to look for love in prostitution and heroes in the rank of ordinary men. I have difficulties articulating what my problem with the film was. It was a shattering experience to watch the close-ups of faces expressing deep fear and agony and in the same way the film takes the viewer to unspeakable places of violence and humiliation. We are taken directly to the horrific events of the siege, without the safety net of a historical context. In all this, I cannot repress the feeling that the film imposes a rather rigid storytelling. By overwhelming me, exhausting me, flooding me with images of cruelty versus bravery, it sets out to tell the truth.

Perhaps a further problem is the dichotomy the film risks evoking: the mass against the heroic individual. On the other hand, the film looks at kindness where we least would expect it. Yes, there is the teacher who provides spots of safety but there is also the German Nazi, Rabe who saves people from a violent death. When I started watching this film I feared that the Japanes soldiers would be treated like monsters. They aren't. The soldiers are a motley crew and Lu Chuan shows the multitude of reaction to the horror expressed by the soldiers: there is shock but also jaded responses. Even though I found some things problematic, City of Life and Death is an important film and it is an example of a war movie that never deals in propaganda. This is something to marvel at, given that the Nanjing siege has remained political dynamite. However, as I said, there is a tension, an ambiguity at play. Even though there is no outrageous propagandistic elements here, the way of telling the story, the appearance of relentless realism, does something with how I relate to the images. There is something strange in the conviction the film tries hard to induce in me. Conviction of what?

Blind Mountain (2007)

Yang Li's Blind Mountain features staggeringly beautiful countryside landscape and a story about big emotions - it is a film that battles patriarchy and the treatment of women as some sort of passive commodity. A young graduate, Xuemei, leaves for the countryside. She thinks she will go there for temporary work but instead she is kidnapped to be somebody's wife. She fights and fights and fights - only to be imprisoned in this home which is not hers. Every day, she waits for a letter, perhaps from her father. Blind Mountain deals with this subject in an passionate way and the portrayal of this injustice is both raw and rugged. That's the positive side. If I have a complaint, it's that things become rather black and white. The community in the film is shown as consisting of people totally in the grip of self-interest, fear and double-minded comforting words - everybody seems to play a game. And also: maybe it's that the material expresses a form of cruelty I can't handle to watch; instead of reacting, I  get numb. I don't know if that's the director would like, because in some ways, the end changes everything and makes me remember the film in a very different way that I would had the ending scene been different. I feel ambivalent about Blind Mountain, perhaps its story is so strong, but the cinematic grasp of this story comes out a bit undeveloped. I find many scenes very engaging (the scenes in which Xuemei tries to escape into town, trying to cross a mountain path) but the depiction of the rural family fails to engage me in the same way.

Life of Pi (2012)

Oh lord.
I accompanied my friends to the movies. Made sure to go to the loo before it started. Sat down in the familiar space where I used to watch movies while in high school and skeptically shoved the 3D glasses up my face. I tried to keep an open mind. I really tried. If somebody puts a gun to my hand and asks me to say something nice about Life of Pi I would confess that some of the images are quite beautiful and that, well, tigers are cute. Beyond that, well, I don't know. The message of the movie seems to be this: even if you have a pretty rough time in your life, just make sure you rely on STORYTELLING. This glorification of narrativity strikes me as deeply self-important and irritating: a movie that boasts of its own special power to seduct, thrill and, you know, deceive us a little to make us more comfortable. If you have a nice story, then you'll be fine. And heck, this comes from Ang Lee, a director whom I generally admire! (Of course one can still admire Lee's stylistic versatility but this is simply not a good movie.) I try to put my finger on what I found so unbearable about Life of Pi. Perhaps it was my first (!) experience of 3D movies - not impressed. Perhaps it was the glossy cinematography that to me appeared completely soulless despite all the 'spirituality' it so eagerly tried to evoke. Perhaps it was the schmaltzy acting. Perhaps it was the strange ideas about religion (more elevation of storytelling) along with the embarrassingly clumsy contrast between scientific rationalism and religious belief. Perhaps its the computerized, sterile feel of the animals that were supposed to be both scary and sublime. This film made its best to put me in a magical state of mind. It didn't succeed. I left the film in a grumpy mood and watched how a local media manager attempted to drive her car out of a heap of snow. 

Still life (2006)

I am trying to get rid of my prejudice about Chinese movies as big-budget boosting about ancient emperors. Still life (dir. Jia Zhangke) has nothing to do with this genre: no action-fuelled fighting, no pompous praising of China, no glossy images. The story of the film is a simple one. A man and a woman are looking for their spouses in the area where the three gorges dam is built. We get as much involved in the personal stories of the two main characters as the landscape in which they move about: demolition, demolition, flooding. Millions of people have been evicted from their homes. This is a world of almost post-apocalyptic measures, just throw in one or two sites of capitalist luxury in the midst of destruction. The film doesn't preach, it shows. Some have pointed out the links to Italian neorealism and Antonioni - which makes complete sense. This is a realistic film in a world which has stopped making sense. One of the characters takes a job while he looks for his wife. The other character meets her business man husband only to tell him that she has fallen in love with another. Their stories are told through understated scenes and silences, rather than big gestures and confrontations. Well, there are a few moments of confrontations in the movie, but not of the kind you expect. In one scene, we see a group of workers attacking their boss for irresponsible behavior - scenes like this, were political material seep into the story about family member, keep the film alive. This separates Still life from almost every other family drama. The film does not approach the family as a closed unit, a little world in itself. Here, our characters are all the time a part of an evolving, open-ended world. Jia Zhangke pays attention to details and not only the big patterns. He makes drama out of mobile phone ring tone, the facial expressions of ferry passengers or a sweaty performance in front of happy workers. Odd elements - UFO:s! - swoosh by in some scenes, and to me, these elements made it all to clear that this is realism but not realism - what the hell is realism in a world like this one?

One of the things that impressed me about this movie was its attention to place. The demolition areas and the grandeour of new projects were put on a par with the space of the home. The way the director keeps alive these both dimension made the rootlessness of the main characters all the more terrible to watch. - Even though the cinematography is elegant and beautiful, I never got the impression that the film aesthetisizes the wasteland shown in these images. 

If you have the opportunity to get a hold of this movie - watch it!

Tuya's Marriage (2006)

Tuya's Marriage (dir. Wang Quan'an) is a visually striking film set in the mongolian countryside. Don't be fooled to think that the film is an expression of totalitarian pomp because it is a Chinese production. Tuya's husband is injured. Tuya is a shephered and right from the start, we are given the impression that she is tough. After hurting her back in an accident, Tuya makes a decision: she has to find a new husband who can take care of her, the other husband and their children. The rest of the film depict Tuya's suitors - there are plenty of them. Don't expect a romantic comedy. Be prepared for an ethnographic exploration of a milieu - hard labor, the steppe, gender roles, quietly absurd scenes. The virtue of Tuya's marriage is that it makes no attempt to make the mongolian countryside look exotic. A few times, I thought that the film could just as well have taken place on my parents' island. The film's beauty is not of the grandiose kind. The film, instead, captures the beauty of everyday life, without sentimentalizing the barren steppe. I was also happy to see that Tuya's loyalty to her husband is not depicted as the loyalty of a Woman; she is just a human being who won't let her friend wither away in some anonymous place. Tuya is not reduced into the gloriously laborious Strong Woman. She might be brave, but she is also angry, sad, bitter. 

Little Red Flowers (2006)

Little Red Flowers (dir. Zhang Yuan) is, I suppose, a critique of totalitarianism and especially a totalitarian form of discipline. A parent takes his son to a kindergarten. It's the kind of kindergarten where the kids stay for a long time, not meeting their parents very often. The film is set, it appears, in the 1960's. The film doesn't tackle the subject of ideology directly. Instead, we see a small boy who is doing everything wrong: he is crying, he cannot dress himself, he pees in the bed, he won't submit to the kindergarten teachers. The children are awarded with small flowers if they are "good". This kid is not, and he is often punished. The film ends with a sense of disillusion: the whole society is like the kindergarten. Even though this is not a perfect film in any way, it was interesting to see the ways in which children conform or don't conform with the attempts to make them compliant and dilligent citizens. It was also interesting to see how every function of life was made a part of routinization: pooping, eating, sleeping, dressing, answering. (Of course, this is a dimension of every child's life almost - but this was a radical example.) -- Not sure how Chinese censors reacted to this film; was it ever distributed in China?