Jia Zhang-ke’s haunting follow-up to Platform tracks various stages of underdevelopment. In the industrial city of Datong in China’s Shanxi province, two disenchanted teenagers struggle with unemployment and raging libidos: Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) falls in love with Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), a singer and dancer who promotes Mongolian King liquor for her boyfriend, a loan shark named Qiao San (Li Zhubin), while his friend Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) struggles against depression and his nagging mother (Bai Ru), a proponent of Falun Gong.
Shot on digital video and staged in real time, Unknown Pleasures achieves an unprecedented level of docu-realism. Jia envisions a hopeful period of social transition despite the overwhelming sense of devastation (a group of Datong textile mill workers celebrate Beijing’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympics and the riches it promises). Hope builds even as various apartment complexes fall to the ground, evoking the last place on Earth.
Culture here is displaced into memory and commodified by an American pop ethos that infiltrates the provincial landscape via techno clubs and black markets. This threat is a pervasive (see Jia’s reference to America’s infiltration of Chinese airspace), functioning for the film’s depressed characters as an escape mechanism. In the end, the incessant Tarantino references are no different than Bin Bin’s fascination with the Monkey King and Qiao Qiao’s evocation of Taoist master Zhuangzi’s “Dreams of a Butterfly.”
Despite the overwhelming sadness of Unknown Pleasures, a certain better-than-here hopefulness pokes through. Dreaming of a better tomorrow, Xiao Ji rides his motorcycle out of the film’s suffocating milieu. Lighting crashes and his bike breaks down on cue. But rather than head back to town, he hitches a ride from a stranger and keeps on truckin’.
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