Dazed and confused
Film of the Month: Unknown Pleasures
A textured study of disaffected youth, Jia Zhang Ke's Unknown Pleasures is a subtle dissection of provincial ennui, argues Peter Matthews.
The utter equivalence of form and content is perhaps the chief beauty of Jia Zhang Ke's Unknown Pleasures. At first and for quite a stretch, the movie seems little more than a hodgepodge of loosely associated scenes that keep on the same flat emotional plane and refuse to build up narrative momentum. There's no plot to speak of - just stray episodes illustrating the everyday lives of some disaffected Chinese youths in a regional hellhole remote from Beijing. Yet the monotony, the listlessness, the irritating lack of resolution are strictly calculated, as it turns out. For these are people facing no conceivable future - who have literally lost the plot.
Nineteen-year-old Xiao Ji's motorbike splutters, stalls and finally stops, an emblem of social torpor which encapsulates Jia's storytelling procedure as well. The writer-director sporadically dangles the prospect of melodrama (a gun, an attempted bank heist) before the hungry audience, but then, almost gleefully, snatches it back, as if to prove that any positive act by the characters is doomed in advance.
While the film is very precisely set in 2001, its temporal dimension (at least in the ordinary sense of progress) feels blocked. Space reciprocally gains an overwhelming salience, trapping the protagonists within grimy, cupboard-sized rooms, or else opening out to engulf them in a vast, rubble-strewn wasteland. Like the classical neorealists, Jia is engaged by texture rather than incident. He arguably goes further, witnessing the concrete particulars of his milieu with the patience, the stringency, the cool objectivity of an ethnographer. There can't be a more subtle dissection of provincial ennui in cinema. But Unknown Pleasures isn't simply about a blighted backwater of China. The malaise extends to the whole modern globalised order, where illusory freedoms create ever tighter bonds of subjection.
Jia's earlier film Platform (2000) employed the microcosm of an itinerant theatre troupe to chart the massive upheavals in Chinese society during the 1980s. As economic liberalism takes hold, the commune gradually splinters - ground down by unseen external forces beyond its control. The director mimics these transformations through slow, painful adjustments in his style. When the characters are still in their Maoist phase, the twinning of a static camera with extreme long shots underwrites a hidebound, insular republic which effectively reduces its citizens to anonymous specks. Once the free market kicks in, however, a few discreet pans and medium shots are grudgingly conceded - all but wrestled from the mise en scène by the strength of the newly unleashed desires.
Platform describes the death throes of the old collectivised world and the birth spasms of the private self. Yet Jia the sober determinist scarcely views the change as a deliverance - more like the inexorable operation of the material base upon the cultural superstructure.
Unknown Pleasures shows the tide of individualism in full swell a decade later, and again finds the precise aesthetic means to gauge the distance travelled. Outwardly hipper and jazzier than its predecessor, the movie rarely looks as though it were filmed using the wrong end of a telescope. Two-shots predominate, with now and then the luxury of a close-up. The camera bobs and weaves with the unparalleled mobility enabled by digital video - the technology itself connoting 'westernisation' or at any rate 'free choice'.
But the continual movement also leads nowhere. Jia's restless camera habitually drifts past actors loitering in doorways or follows them on desultory circuits around the shabbier neighbourhoods of Datong - the name (which translates as 'Great Harmony') bitterly ironised by the post-industrial devastation we see. Though Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) and his elusive love object Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) favour poses of blank-faced anomie, it's clear enough that their existential chic springs ultimately from hard economics. For capitalist development is irrational, the commercial energy at the centre filtering unevenly to the margins and leaving a traditional textile town like Datong out of the loop altogether. Youth unemployment breeds fatalism - an analysis that may be read from the film frame without the slightest didactic prompting by the script.
Xiao Ji's more conventional pal Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) attempts to join the army as a last-ditch escape, while Qiao Qiao tries her luck at the fag end of show business, dancing in promotions for Mongolian King Liquor. But Jia sours even these pathetic dreams with a bout of hepatitis and a swift decline into prostitution respectively. The only manifest winner is Bin Bin's girlfriend, serious, dedicated Yuan Yuan (Zhou Qing Feng), who brings the bygone party discipline to a projected career in international trade.
Feeling no such connection with history and expecting nothing, the others live hedonistically for the present moment. A certain bleak comedy attends their efforts to restyle apathy as a mode of glamorous elitism - especially since limited spending power obliges them to make a third-rate job of it. Xiao Ji's version of carpe diem is cruising at random on that dilapidated bike, a Belmondoesque cigarette hanging permanently from his lips. Qiao Qiao sports Capri pants, a pink jacket and a tacky Cleopatra wig in bold defiance of her drab environment. Both characters have scenes of unmasking (or in Qiao Qiao's case, unwigging) where the mopey affectations are stripped away and the original, naked creature steps out - soft, larva-like and frightened.
The single activity that engages the slackers (if interest can be deduced from their glassy stares) is watching television. In a device repeated with ritual frequency, Jia exhibits some topical item on the box - the collision of an American with a Chinese plane over Hainan or the announcement that Beijing will host the 2008 Olympics - then pans to the seemingly unmoved teenage spectators. The news could be broadcast from Mars for its relevance to the recipients. Still, one perceives that it feeds obscurely into their funk by offering an interminable, rolling chaos of events which they are unable to absorb, let alone influence.
The partial thaw in the state media delivers a bewildering surfeit of imagery to the powerless, and the film's English title (the Chinese one Ren Xiao Yao means 'free of all constraints') bears this sense of infinite opportunities lying just out of reach. The carefully layered soundtrack fills the air with tantalising promise - in the sad, stoical lyrics of a pop song and in the easy money espoused by a blaring advertisement for the lottery.
Cynics might suggest that the adolescent angst is a typical narcissistic reaction to ungratified consumerism. It's true that the callow protagonists ennoble their despair, and Jia is sharp on how the influx of American (or Americanised) mass culture fosters egocentricity. Qiao Qiao evidently sees herself as the Madonna of the sticks; Xiao Ji grooves to the jaunty nihilism of Pulp Fiction. Such ready-made identities may be peeled off at will - a loss of authenticity corroborated in a curious scene where Bin Bin flogs VCDs (among them Platform) to a loan shark named Xiao Wu (the hero of Jia's 1997 debut feature Pickpocket). It would appear that the western disease of wry self-referentiality has begun to infect China. But though Jia is tempted, he never succumbs, maintaining a firm gap between the symptom and its diagnosis.
The movie could be criticised for fixating on the young, treating them as special, and to that degree ratifying their solipsistic rebellion. It does endeavour to view the kids anthropologically, but they are granted an extra edge of sympathy that's withheld from the few adult characters - dim descendants of those neglectful, complaining parents who spawned juvenile delinquents in 1950s Hollywood. Yet this faint romanticism qualifies Jia to be the voice of a generation, whose mood he distils with infallible delicacy and rigour.