May 15 2009
24 City, Jia Zhang-Ke
Watched the 24 Cities with the Boston couple.
Never want to watch Jia’s movie sitting in a confined seat again. The movie was so repetitive, raw and edgy that when I can’t move around, I felt a dread of claustrophobia.
The movie tells close to a dozen personal stories, some warm, some sad, some funny and some inspiring. Therefore, I can’t tell what Jia is trying to express just by listening to the stories alone.
Art, particularly the abstract kind, is meant to be a mirror for the beholder. Different people can read into this movie thousands of different ways, each a reflection of one’s own neurosis.
What resonated with me was the claustrophobic life in China, the Hegemony of Others, so to speak. The fear of being just another of the 1 billion was suffocating. Other than the few pure suffering-tales in the beginning, the rest of them all tell a story of trying to find significance in one’s own being.
Xiao Hua, the Joan Chen’s character, chooses loneliness on principal. The manager’s assistant remembered not how he ascended from the bottom (to where he is today), but why he was spared a certain beating in the hands of a bully (because Zhou Enlai died on that day). The last girl (personal shopper) is perhaps the most telling: she suddenly “grew up” when she saw her mom working in a mass factory like the characters in Apple’s 1984 commercial.
Yet in the uber-materialistic contemporary China, what is considered “significant” is by no means a consensus. Maybe that is why the personal stories are so varied yet feel so familiar.
New Yorker ran a good article on Jia’s career and style: his roots in Shanxi, Martin Scoresesse’ praise, his anti-establishment credentials. Also met a movie critic Jay who lamented that Jia has become just another “Chinese director”. One thing he pointed out was how dressy his storytelling has become versus the raw emotion, the bold expression used in his earlier days.
I guess I have to watch a couple of more his earlier works to make up my mind.
No idea who coined the poem that gives the movie its title. But it is quite beautiful: 二十四城芙蓉花，锦官自昔称繁华. But the movie reminded me more of “巴山夜雨涨秋池” kind of nostalgia.