Shijie (The World)

Stills and poster from "Shijie", or "The World" by Jia Zhang-ke

I saw this movie last week at the end of the HK Film Festival, and it far exceeded all the hype surrounding it. Everyone has been talking about this movie (well, the people that have seen it at film festivals so far, since there is no set US release date), for a few major reasons--

1) Its director Jia Zhang-ke's first "government sanctioned" film, meaning meaning it can legally play inside China (it just opened Friday, I haven't heard much of the public response yet). Branded as an "underground filmmaker" since the beginning of his career, Jia has never gained government approval for his work, or was able to release his films in his own country, until now. Nobody seems to be crying "sell-out", however most Chinese filmmakers and critics recognize that this may mark the beginning of a new, not-so-indie Chinese independent film scene.

2) It's the quintessential "China movie of the moment". In about two and a half hours, Jia deals with nearly all the hot-button "China issues": globalization, cell phone culture, Beijing Olympics, designer brand piracy, industrial accidents, pollution, suicide, urban migration, diaspora, etc. etc. In short, it's a China studies-sociologist's wet dream on celluloid.

3) Beyond that, "The World" is bound to be a landmark Chinese film (particularly to Western eyes) because it is "sexy" and mainstream enough (though still highly-avant-garde) to create buzz and fill enough seats that it might just do what no Chinese movie has done (on a wide scale) in years: show Americans something about the lives of contemporary urban Chinese-- no kung fu, no period concubines, no poor-rural-children tear-jerking. There have been hipster Taipei and Hong Kong films before, but this is one of the few Mainland movies that is gritty, hip and sophisticated all at the same time, and it couldn't be coming at a better time.

4) This movie might also represent the newest stage of "post-modern" discourse, or "simulacra theory", or something. Reverse Shot does a nice job at summing up these arguments with this piece, and I'm sure that the rest of academia is going to be frothing at the mouth about this movie soon enough. How can they not? The film is set at "World Park" in Beijing (a real place, the movie was shot there as well), an enormous theme park where all "the world" is reproduced in miniature. In "France", an Eiffel Tower stretches upwards at 1/3 the scale; in "India", Chinese girls in saris dance in front of a duplex-sized Taj Mahal. The main characters who work at the park (one such dancing girl, Tao, and her erstwhile boyfriend Taisheng) are engaged in the messy business of real life and love in the midst of artificiality- not just the setting, but other virtualities like fake designer bags and karaoke and cell-phone-only relationships (these occasional made even more false by lapses into non-diegetic animated sequences). In short, it's also a critical theorists wet dream.

But how is the movie? Just in case you were worried all this "significance" was too great a burden for one film to bear, it's not. The cinematography is breathtaking, the music is operatic and overwhelming, the story is startling and endless and inevitable, and most importantly the characters have real hearts that really beat. Even when they feel distant (from themselves and each other and the audience), they "tug" us all the same-- Jia knows the power of a small figure in a long-shot landscape and isn't afraid to use it. Though the ending is sad (an understatement, perhaps), and tragedy pervades the entire movie and all these tiny, fragile characters, we are left with some kind of exuberant possibility. For China? For Cinema? That just sounds pretentious, now, don't it? But still. I walked out of the (supremely ugly TST Cultural Center) theatre into bright daylight, raw and excited for whatever comes next. It's that kind of dihnying.