FILM THE WORLD DIRECTOR JIA ZHANGKE
Jia Zhang-ke’s The World (2004)
From The Village Voice, Dennis Lim’s review of Jia Zhang-ke’s The World:
The Beijing World Park in Fengtai District is evidently a cheap and evil indulgence . . . and the presence of the world is felt in the grubby thumb-prints of its Tower Bridge, Eiffel tower, and Twin Towers tourist attractions. Lim’s ugly "ersatz replica" . . . giving flesh to, or rather framing and colouring – through the use of faux-bricks and mortar reality — a soft-focus dream wherein the hopes and aspirations of the many are collapsed into one crude, loud, pantomime reality: government-controlled, insular, illusory. In Jia’s film, a showgirl, her security guard boyfriend and his construction worker brother — all provincials trying to exist by moving into the cities — tread a well-worn path on their respective journeys towards doomed failure. Their story is never overly dramatic or literary; they simply work like animals. The film’s central protagonist, Tao, entertains as a tour guide by day and dons several costumes on a nightly basis for her dance numbers, locked into a lifestyle of crude extravagance, haunted by the dead-end loneliness of the job ... and yet, quite uniquely it seems in this immoral universe, she knows how to live and to act virtuously. For this is Tao’s world. She is an attractive young thing, "sprite-like" according to Salon; but what surprises us the most about Tao, making her even more attractive, that which probably also therefore captivates the Russian dancer (Anna) she befriends even though the two cannot properly converse, is her quiet self-assurance. She may not be content where she is, and we’re inclined of course to empathise with her on that front given the restrictions imposed on average Chinese citizens, but she seems to know who she is and the right way to act. Yet never having enough time or privacy to settle into intimate conversation with her boyfriend, and perhaps for her own part never having truly communicated with a man whose only mission, evidently, is to crank the relationship up to top speed so they can trade bodily fluids with zero commitment, Tao is perhaps a victim of her own doing: the suggestion being that she is made to suffer (or because she is made good, she can suffer).
This distinctly palpable revelation prevails, and days after seeing the film, I still feel it. When, I ask myself, did I become so cynical?With mock-infomercial solemnity, The World flashes the park’s slogan on the screen: “See the world without ever leaving Beijing.” Anyone who has seen a Jia film will realise this is less a promise than a threat. The cruel revelation is that what awaits out in the world is nothing better — or more real — than what’s in The World.
The Beijing World Park in Fengtai District is evidently a cheap and evil indulgence . . . and the presence of the world is felt in the grubby thumb-prints of its Tower Bridge, Eiffel tower, and Twin Towers tourist attractions. Lim’s ugly "ersatz replica" . . . giving flesh to, or rather framing and colouring – through the use of faux-bricks and mortar reality — a soft-focus dream wherein the hopes and aspirations of the many are collapsed into one crude, loud, pantomime reality: government-controlled, insular, illusory. In Jia’s film, a showgirl, her security guard boyfriend and his construction worker brother — all provincials trying to exist by moving into the cities — tread a well-worn path on their respective journeys towards doomed failure. Their story is never overly dramatic or literary; they simply work like animals. The film’s central protagonist, Tao, entertains as a tour guide by day and dons several costumes on a nightly basis for her dance numbers, locked into a lifestyle of crude extravagance, haunted by the dead-end loneliness of the job ... and yet, quite uniquely it seems in this immoral universe, she knows how to live and to act virtuously. For this is Tao’s world. She is an attractive young thing, "sprite-like" according to Salon; but what surprises us the most about Tao, making her even more attractive, that which probably also therefore captivates the Russian dancer (Anna) she befriends even though the two cannot properly converse, is her quiet self-assurance. She may not be content where she is, and we’re inclined of course to empathise with her on that front given the restrictions imposed on average Chinese citizens, but she seems to know who she is and the right way to act. Yet never having enough time or privacy to settle into intimate conversation with her boyfriend, and perhaps for her own part never having truly communicated with a man whose only mission, evidently, is to crank the relationship up to top speed so they can trade bodily fluids with zero commitment, Tao is perhaps a victim of her own doing: the suggestion being that she is made to suffer (or because she is made good, she can suffer).
Tao (Zhao Tao) in Jia Zhang-ke’s The World (2004)
Which brings us to The World’s life of illusion, or more specifically the question: what does Tao really know about her life? This from Brian Hu of the UCLA Asia Institute on one of The World’s tourist attractions:
The tragedy is that Tao finds happiness and contentment in the delusion. Not in the rotten and mangled nonsense promoted to workers by the park, not in the advertisement of Chinese globalisation by or in itself ... but in the delusion of shared feeling - a delusion whose promise, sadly, was loyalty and fidelity.On this informal tour is a replica of Manhattan. “This is America,” the worker says. “Even though the twin towers fell on September 11, we still have them.” In these few words, Jia captures the park’s odd sense of pride in commoditized reality which seems completely oblivious to real world events and struggles. The tragedy is that the worker is led to believe in his words, because without a passport or access to free journalism, he has no reason but to accept what delusions he is given.
17 October, 2007
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