In Part B, TIM WONG guides us from the rebellion of Shanghai Dreams, to the modern alienation of The World.


» [Part A] | Part B

TWO FILMS this festival particularly befitting of the "youth" tag hail from China, a country once known for oppressing the kind of things today's young people take for granted. Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams – recent recipient of the Jury Prize at Cannes – charts the semi-autobiographical uprooting of a family relocated to the rural town of Guiyang via China's "Third Line" movement: a heed to the government's strategic call in the mid 60s for new factories and settlements to be established deep inland. The film picks up in the early 80s, towing the same line of social and political reform hauled so vividly through Jia Zhangke's pinpoint sophomore feature, Platform.

Jia is arguably the voice of disaffected youth in modern cinema, and it was his own personal retrospective of becoming an adult in the 80s that set the bar for his two subsequent, contemporary-set films Unknown Pleasures and The World. In Platform, China's most vigorous and rapid period of change sees the film's characters swept up in the dissipation of Maoist thought and revolutionary idealism – a regime suddenly cast aside in a wave of pop music and fashion courtesy of the government's "open door" policy.

Simutanously in Shanghai Dreams, the family's eldest, Qing hong (a dainty Gao Yuanyuan), is like most grown teens: under strict watch, encouraged to study and expected to attend college. But like the cultural troupe in Platform, she goes from performing propaganda songs to listening to Teresa Teng. In school, her classmates' pants are taken to with scissors if they're bellbottoms, and her overbearing father – who genuinely means well – strips her of a pair of bright red heels she receives from a love struck boy. The film, more so than any other at the festival, plays out like a latter-day Rebel Without a Cause: the guys slick their hair back with attitude, the kids gawk all over the latest threads and tunes, the parents are as thorny as ever, and the very notion of individualism intoxicates with ease.

Jim's dilemma, of course, was that he always yearned for the paternal concern that Qing hong openly denies. In East of Eden, he's neglected because he's the bad egg; in Rebel Without of a Cause, his dad wears an apron. When things eventually turn to shit for Qing hong – a slightly flummoxing spanner in the works by way of her desperate admirer – her parents rally around her despite all the lies and sneaking out (not that they didn't before), something poor Deano went pretty much without. And ultimately, it's her father who saves them all, orchestrating a dawn escape from their factory occupation that acknowledges the onset of change with the same logic of Platform's dislocated souls: that there's no alternative other than to keep moving forward.


In The World, Jia Zhangke's first officially sanctioned film (his previous three were condemned by the Chinese government), the young are now adults – although you wouldn't think it, given the incessant preoccupation with their cell phones. Staged within the grounds of Beijing's World Park – certainly one of the most surreal, ludicrously bogus appropriations you're ever likely to see – the idea of unremitting change is still firmly entrenched in Jia's discourse. A Disneyland of ethnic sideshows and continental themes encircled by scale recreations of the Egyptian pyramids, the Manhattan skyline (including the Twin Towers, one proud onlooker boasts) and the Eiffel Tower, the park itself embodies China's craving for globalisation, and more alarmingly, the artifice of freedom against a backdrop of mass urbanisation.

For Tao (Jia regular Zhao Tao) and her friends, globetrotting between landmark destinations is just one of the perks of living and working at The World. But it's done with such nonchalance, sometimes even abused (all under a pretense of independence), that it's clear they've all plunged down the rabbit hole, maybe never to come up. Jia may have a larger socio-economic ethnography at work here – sprawl, capitalism and whatnot – and whilst the very panoramic scope of the film overwhelms to the point of reducing humans to dots on a map, it always comes back to people lost in the strobe of it all.

Apathetic, they use the park as a means of keeping the exterior at bay – a sort of blanket that however comforting, still leaves them vulnerable to change. In one instance, Tao strikes up a friendship with a Russian dancer. Neither speaks a word of each other's language, yet their communication is strangely succinct (one of the more genuine relationships in a film built on the disconnected). The Russian eventually abandons the park for prostitution catering to China's new breed of wealthy, only for Tao to bump into her at a nightclub – the dread at what she's fallen into plain to see. Back inside, they're all snugly coffined and doped up on a maelstrom of bright lights and woozy trance music (scored by Lim Giong, of Millennium Mambo fame) that renders anything beyond the margins of their "world" foreign, irrelevant, at times inhospitable. For others, like the Russians, or menial construction workers Erxiao and Little Sister, the world they know is less forgiving and without illusion.

Much of the film's power lies in its technical design in unison with a pervading consumer age – something those in Platform and Shanghai Dreams were only on the cusp of. In The World, it's now fully inbred; magic carpet rides and silent monorails glide to the tune of a cocooned hush; cell phones are ubiquitous; text messaging is the dialogue of choice. Here, Jia really amps up the alienation motif so it's in your face, where the cellular network layers on top of an already mediated landscape (via playful animated sequences akin to those in Take Care of My Cat), and where the very lines of communication are virtualised and bereft of meaning. It's also hypnotically shot by Yu Lik-wai: his hi-def cinematography a prism of fabricated scapes and perverse juxtapositions that the Chinese government may think is good for tourism, but in reality is as telling as Jia's own thinly-veiled critiques. It's one of the best-composed digital features ever, and 6 months in, one of the best so far this year.

» [Part A] | Part B