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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
A breakthrough work from one of today's most important young directors. Plus: Tarantino's camera guy explores "oral sexuality," and Sally Potter delivers hot sex -- in iambic pentameter -- to the NPR set.
Jun 23, 2005 | Want contemporary social relevance? We got it in spades. But relevance isn't always what it seems to be at the movies. In short order I'll get to this week's prime offering, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke's "The World," which could certainly be read as a gloomy parable about the costs of globalization. But let's face it, that's a terrible reason for paying 10 bucks to sit in the dark with strangers for two hours. You don't want to see "The World" for its supposed message; you want to see it because it's a dreamy romantic tragedy, staged with tremendous poignancy against the hypermodern desolation of contemporary Beijing.
First, though, while I won't attempt to calculate the odds of two films in the same week focusing on love affairs between white women and Arab men, let's agree it's a striking coincidence. The differences between Ziad Doueiri's "Lila Says" and Sally Potter's "Yes," however, are more instructive than the similarities.
Defenders of pop culture -- as if it needed any defending at this point -- will observe that network TV has already engaged this topic, a couple of years back in a plotline on the Fox series "24." (The Arab was innocent; the white woman was a terrorist.) That's what TV does; it tackles "issues" by absorbing them whole and virtually undigested into its plot-driven, deterministic universe.
Forgive me for using such a terrible word in the 21st century, but art is actually after something different, even something bigger. If neither "Lila Says" nor "Yes" fires on all cylinders all the time, that's because both films have higher ambitions, and take bigger risks, than anything you're likely to see on TV. I don't recall that the aforementioned "24" romance was conducted in iambic pentameter (as in "Yes"), or that the white woman's first question to her Levantine swain was "Do you want to see my pussy?" (as in "Lila Says").
Beyond that, Doueiri's and Potter's films are both experiments, combinations of odd elements that forge alchemically into something unique and nonreproducible. Whatever their flaws, "Yes" and "Lila Says" are breathtaking visual adventures that don't seek to replicate the surfaces of the visible world or trudge through the steps of some familiar narrative or another. Instead, both try to create the haunted, magical space of cinema, which exists somewhere between the outside world and the innermost temple of our consciousness. They remind us, among other things, that while all movies are constructions, the best are closer to being cathedrals than airports.
"The World": Love among the Pyramids (and the Eiffel Tower, too)
"The Twin Towers were bombed on Sept. 11," says one character ruefully to another in Jia Zhangke's new film "The World." "But we still have them here."
Well, yeah, sort of. "Here" is World Park, a perennially under-construction theme park in suburban Beijing that features a spookily foreshortened replica of pre-9/11 Lower Manhattan, sitting in a lagoon-sized version of New York Harbor. That's only one of World Park's attractions; none of Jia's characters has ever left China, but they all spend their days wandering from the Taj Mahal to the Pyramids to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Elvis-maned, chain-smoking Taisheng (Chen Taishen) works as a park security guard and spends most of his day on the observation deck of a one-third-size Eiffel Tower.
Jia's title, and this setting, establish a set of ironies almost too obvious to comment upon, but "The World" is not some arch or chilly exercise in postmodern anomie. If a movie can be stark and rapturous at the same time, this is that movie. Taisheng and his girlfriend, Tao (the sprite-like Zhao Tao), are kids from the poor and distant provinces trying to make it in the big city; their story is an archetypal one about big dreams, lurid temptations and doomed love. Their environment at World Park sometimes seems barren beyond belief, but at other times it's lovely or comic: Tao walking across a simulated Piazza San Marco with her shawl fluttering in the breeze; Taisheng berating his errant brother Erxiao (Ji Shuai) beneath a bogus Sphinx and a solitary, cud-chewing camel.
Jia became an international cult hero for his earlier films "Platform" and "Unknown Pleasures," shot documentary-style amid the disaffected, pop-saturated youth of his native Shanxi province, in China's rugged and remote northwest. Filmed in spectacular wide-screen format on a much higher budget (that is, higher than nothing), "The World" memorably fulfills his potential, and if some tiny percentage of his film festival audience thinks he's sold out, that's too bad for them. (Answer to a question I have long considered: The translated title of "Unknown Pleasures" deliberately references the late-'70s Joy Division album; the Chinese title doesn't.)
Like the director's other films, "The World" combines soap opera, sociology, pop spectacle and pure imagistic cinema. Jia's not afraid to shoot the cheese-ball theme-park dance numbers Tao performs and make them look stunning, but his best moments actually come in heartbreakingly intimate compositions: Tao doing a backbend in the cluttered World Park dormitory, clutching a cigarette, with Taisheng's arms around her waist. Or the two of them riding a "magic carpet" in "Paris" -- they sit absolutely still while a video camera wobbles and a monitor depicts them sailing happily above the Trocadéro fountains.
You may feel at first that "The World" is a striking film in which not much is happening, but Jia gradually builds a densely absorbing web of stories around the central couple. There's Tao's best friend, Wei (Jing Jue), a redheaded dancer, and her jealous boyfriend, Niu (Jiang Zhongwei). There's a young man from Taisheng's village, mysteriously named Little Sister, who shows up and starts working double shifts as a construction worker on the booming outskirts of World Park, with disastrous consequences. There's Qun (Huang Yiqun), an affluent clothing designer whose husband lives overseas and who takes a predatory interest in Taisheng. There's a Russian dancer named Anna (Alla Chtcherbakova), who becomes Tao's friend although they can't speak a word of each other's language.
There's no question that "The World" depicts a culture that has radically uprooted itself and traveled in two or three decades from agrarian feudalism to text messaging, karaoke and theme parks. But this film is not an angry or polemical tale; it's a sad and sweet one, simultaneously entranced by nostalgia for a lost China (and, really, a lost humanity) and by the luscious allure of a new technological age.
When Tao and Taisheng read the text messages on their cellphones, Jia launches delicious animated sequences depicting their internal worlds. These are so delightful and surprising I shouldn't spoil them for you, and one could say the same about this film as a whole. (Fair warning: If you demand unconditionally happy endings from your love stories, stay home and watch "You've Got Mail.") This time the film-geek hype is justified: "The World" is a breakthrough work from one of the most important young directors anywhere in, um, the world.
"The World" opens July 1 in New York, July 29 in Chicago and Washington, Aug. 26 in Boston and Sept. 9 in Seattle, with more cities to follow.
