Last May, Evan Osnos profiled the Chinese director Jia Zhangke, whose most recent film, “24 City,” was released later in the year. (It comes out on DVD next week.) He mentions Jia’s third feature, “Unknown Pleasures,” from 2002, which I discuss in the clip above. It is, as Evan says, about “restless, disillusioned youths in a rust-belt town,” but it’s also about what causes their disillusionment, and the nature of the illusions they’ve lost. In short, like all of Jia’s films, it’s a political film, in which the characters are inseparable (visually and sonically) from their context, which is depicted by way of precise, salient details. (Even the magnificent title is terribly, comically sarcastic—it figures within the film itself as the name of a dance that a young woman performs at an event to promote a brand of liquor.)
I’ve been writing about Jia’s films every chance I get (and I put his 2005 feature “The World” in my top-ten for the decade). It was of particular interest to consider the wily ways of Jia’s social critique in “Useless,” his commissioned portrait of the Chinese fashion designer Ma Ke, and the importance of his faux-whimsical digital effects in “Still Life,” a drama set against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam project. Working in China, Jia has had to express his thoughts with a certain irony, yet it’s astonishing to see how audacious he has been, given the constraints of censorship. (Part of the story is China’s selective tolerance of criticism from its filmmakers whose films, for the most part, are not widely seen in China. Evan discusses the issue in his Profile.)
