The Top 40 Films of 2009 (20-16)

20. 24 City/Er shi si cheng ji (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2008)

Read my review here.



19. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, US, 2008)











18. Import/Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2007)



17. Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung, Rwanda/US, 2007)

Read my review here.





16. Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan, 2008)

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Jia Zhang-ke, "24 City" (2008)

24 City (Er shi si cheng ji). 2008. Directed by Jia Zhang-ke. Written by Jia Zhang-ke and Zhai Yongming. Produced by Jia Zhang-ke, Shozo Ichiyama, and Wang Hong. Cinematography by Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu. Edited by Lin Xudong, Kong Jinlai, and Li Haiyang. Music by Yoshihiro Hanno and Lim Giong. Art direction by Liu Qiang and Chen Rongchao. Sound design by Zhang Yang. Costume design by Zhao Tong.

Cast: Joan Chen (Gu Minhua), Lu Liping (Hao Dali), Zhao Tao (Su Na), Chen Jianbin (Zhao Gang).

Jia Zhang-ke's magisterial, mesmerizing documentary/fiction hybrid, 24 City, opens today in New York at the IFC Center. Surely one of the best films of the year, it's scheduled to play for just a week, so get thee to the theater immediately. The proximity of this film's release to the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising may or may not be coincidental, but the occasion certainly provides much food for thought on the massive changes that have occurred in China since then. (For a great assessment of the ongoing legacy of the Tiananmen Square protests, check out this post on Edwin Mak's blog.)

Below is a (slightly modified) review of 24 City that I wrote when it screened at last year's New York Film Festival:

Perhaps the most famous of cinema pioneers the Lumière Brothers’ works is “Workers Leaving the Factory,” a 50-second film which consists of a static shot of what its title describes. This ancestral cinematic image is echoed by several shots of Jia Zhang-ke’s extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful, documentary/fiction hybrid, 24 City. The film focuses on 420 Factory in Chengdu, Sichuan province, a former military munitions plant which is about to be torn down and moved to another area to make way for an ultramodern housing complex known as “24 City,” a name which has a vaguely Alphaville-esque, sci-fi tinge to it.

24 City is structured as a series of nine monologues, five of which are spoken by actual workers in the factory, and four of which are delivered by actors, including a trio of great actresses – Lu Liping, Joan Chen and Jia regular Zhao Tao, representing three generations of Chinese history. The experiences of Chinese women are very prominent in this film, much more so than in Jia’s previous work, thanks to the influence of Jia’s co-screenwriter, female poet Zhai Yongming, a native of Chengdu. This is Jia’s densest and most complex film to date, encompassing reality and fiction, and peppered with quotations from Chinese poetry and William Butler Yeats. Music, especially, plays a key role: excerpts of the Internationale play on the soundtrack, workers in the film sing both patriotic anthems and romantic pop songs, and a Chinese opera troupe (led by Joan Chen) performs within the crumbling walls of the factory.

24 City was originally conceived by Jia as a straight documentary; however, the film slowly transformed into a rich collage of stories and physical memorabilia (worker ID cards, photographs, letters) that document the changes across fifty years of Chinese history, refracted through the collective consciousness of this factory. “As far as I’m concerned, history is always a blend of facts and imagination,” Jia says in the film’s press notes. This could refer to both Maoist policies and propaganda that shaped the fortunes of this factory and to the nature of Jia’s project. Jia keeps his focus on individual human stories, a riposte to the Chinese government’s insistence on requiring workers to constantly take it on the chin for the good of society, to be displaced and replaced at will, to always be on time and never miss a day, and never protest or complain.

Far from the vapid, simpleminded analyses of China offered by most American mainstream media, Jia explores these issues with poetry and melancholic beauty. Construction and factory life have surely never been given more vivid and lyrical form than here. Although the film has its share of poignant moments, Jia manages to inject a fair amount of humor in this scenario, one example being a particularly cheeky meta-cinematic reference: Joan Chen’s character, Little Flower, is a “factory beauty” famed for her uncanny resemblance to … Joan Chen.

24 City cements Jia’s status as perhaps the most vital and poetic chronicler of present-day China, and the economic and physical changes wrought by this country’s rapid upward mobility. “I see movies as a tool to record memory,” Jia told me last year during an interview I conducted with him at last year’s New York Film Festival, after a press screening of his previous film Useless. His latest film fulfills this stated aim, and then some. The stunning, hyper-real digital images provided by cinematographers Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu bring the history and the architecture of this factory into nearly three-dimensionally vivid focus. 24 City is initially challenging and unsettling, due to the unusual nature of his project, but Jia, as always, richly rewards the viewer’s patience, and in the final shots that cap Zhao Tao’s tour de force performance (what a treasure this actress is!), the film culminates with a stunning visual epiphany.

Click here for the schedule of screenings at the IFC Center.

Review: Jia Zhang-ke's "Still Life"

Still Life (Sanxia Haoren). 2006. Directed by Jia Zhang-ke. Written by Jia Zhang-ke, Sun Jianmin, and Guan Na. Produced by Xu Pengle, Wang Tianyun, and Zhu Jiong. Cinematography by Yu Lik-wai. Edited by Khung Jinlei. Art direction by Liang Jindong and Liu Qiang. Music by Lim Giong.

Cast: Han Sanming (Sanming), Zhao Tao (Shen Hong), Li Zhubin (Guo Bin), Wang Hongwei (Wang Dong Ming), Ma Lizhen (Missy Ma), Lan Zhou (Huang Mao, Motorcycle Taxi Driver), Xiang Haiyu (Mr. He), Zhou Lin (Brother Pony), Huang Yong (Little Yong), Luo Mingwang (Old Ma).

The title of Jia Zhang-ke’s latest feature would seem at first to be grimly ironic, since the Three Gorges Dam, around which the film’s bifurcated narrative revolves, has caused the lives of everyone around it to be anything but still. At the same time, Jia’s moody, contemplative camerawork forces us to pay attention to the impact of China’s rapid progress, especially in the year of the Beijing Olympics, which is shaping up as China’s symbolic coming-out party as an economic and cultural world power to be reckoned with. The vagaries of U.S. film distribution are such that no less than three significant Chinese films from 2006 and 2007, each provocative in its own unique way, will be released this month. The first is Still Life, one of the strongest works to date by one of China’s, and indeed the world’s, finest filmmakers. (The others are Li Yu’s Lost in Beijing and Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, both of which angered Chinese authorities, earning its respective filmmakers, and mutual producer, an official ban from the Chinese film industry).

In Still Life, Jia’s loose structure unfolds with the uncommon grace and unforced lyricism which is his forte. Almost everything we see is in an advanced state of decay and disrepair, yet possesses its own unsettling beauty. This brings to mind two recent documentaries set in China, both vivid evocations of this country’s twenty-first century industrial age: Jennifer Bachiwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky, and Jia’s own documentary Dong, the reality companion piece to the (mostly) fictional Still Life. As Jia told me in an interview I conducted with him last year, “I see movies as a tool to record memory.” Memory of what is rapidly being lost is one of the many eloquent themes of Jia’s film, and the loss of the past is what links the two non-converging stories he tells in Still Life.

In the first story, Sanming (Huang Sanming), a coal miner, travels from Shanxi province (also Jia’s birthplace) to the town of Fengjie to search for the wife and daughter he lost 16 years ago. Along the way he meets, and sometimes befriends, an array of fascinating characters, each of whom could be the subject of their own film. The first address Sanming searches (written on the carton of a long-defunct brand of cigarettes) is now only a strip of grass in the vast body of water created by the dam. To earn money, he participates in the same destruction that consumed his old home, helping to tear down buildings earmarked for demolition to make way for the dam. Sanming looks every inch his age, and every year seems to have taken its toll on him. Yet, there remains within him an irrepressible spirit, and he strives to make amends for neglecting important matters in his younger years. Despite being a willing agent in the destruction of his country’s memory, his efforts to mend his personal life and to fully connect his past and his future place him in sharp contrast to his government and its headlong rush to destroy centuries of culture in order to pursue an insanely rapid pace of prosperity. The death of one of the men he befriends leads directly to his own symbolic rebirth, when at the conclusion of his story he returns to Shanxi with a renewed life purpose. Jia’s beautifully nuanced rendering of Sanming’s story eschews simple despair and agitprop anger in order to create a more poetic vision of life’s circularity and ability to encompass humor and melancholy, tragedy and beauty.

In the second story, Shen Hong (Jia regular Zhao Tao, marvelous), a nurse, searches for her husband Guo Bin (Li Zhubin), who abandoned her two years before. She goes to his workplace, where her husband, much like Sanming, works on demolishing buildings. Unlike Sanming, however, Guo Bin is in a much higher social class, overseeing of a large staff. To complement his official employees, he also hires local thugs to persuade those reluctant to leave their homes to make way for the demolition. As Shen Hong searches for her husband, she incessantly drinks water, filling her bottle along the way, a sly reference to the vast body of water that is submerging Fengjie as a result of the dam. Shen Hong’s story ends with a subtle twist that is remarkable for the almost throw-away manner in which it is delivered. This clues us in to the fact that Jia is less interested in narrative than he is in the palpable mood of loss and disappearance.

Although Sanming and Shen Hong never meet, their stories are connected by an odd visual trope (which I won’t give away), which counteracts the downbeat realism of the film’s scenario, and exhibits a playfulness of form that tempers the sadness which permeates the film. Still Life, which earned Jia a Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, continues an extraordinary body of work that always privileges humanism over politics and ideology, and uses cinema as a tool for this quest to powerful effect.

Still Life is released by New Yorker Films and opens in New York on January 18 at the IFC Center.

Tribeca Film Festival Round-up

Black Sheep (Jonathan King): Sure, there's a faint semblance of social commentary in this lurid tale of genetic engineering gone awry. Both rapacious capitalists and clueless animal-rights activists come in for equal helpings of scorn. But that's not why this film is a hilarious delight. It's all about the blood and guts, and this one delivers plenty. Peter Jackson's W.E.T.A. special effects house supplied them, and this film recalls the broad anarchic splendor of Jackson's own early films. This is the sort of film the term "midnight movie" was made for. Make sure to see it with as large and raucous a crowd as possible. The final sight gag is priceless, and you'll never look at a moving herd of sheep in quite the same way again. A cautionary tale, to be sure, this film illustrates the pitfalls of loving your farm animals a little too much.

Two in One (Kira Muratova): The Ukrainian auteur returns to the binary structure of her earlier film The Aesthenic Syndrome with two connected stories by separate screenwriters: the first concerns an actor's suicide during rehearsals for a play, and the second is the play that the actors perform. Muratova's stylistic hallmarks are in full force: the maddening repetition of dialogue and other elements, most notably the dead actor's ringing cell phone; the circus-like atmosphere of the actors' bizarre behaviors. Muratova is an acquired cinematic taste, to be sure, and her films often seem designed to test the viewer's patience. And judging from the walkouts at this morning's press screening, many will fail miserably. I was often mesmerized, although the first hour is admittedly sometimes a struggle to get through.

Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke): Jia once again proves himself to be one of the half-dozen best filmmakers on the planet. Against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam project, which has displaced many people, and stands as a potent metaphor for the massive steamroller of China's inexorable economic progress (if you want to call it that), two people separately search for their long-estranged spouses. Loss permeates this intensely sad and beautiful film. The first searcher goes back to his hometown and his guide points to a thin island on the water, telling him that's what's left of the street where he grew up. All the characters experience firsthand the impermanence of their existence, and many await the inevitable spray-painted sign on their home: "OK For Demolition." Jia's regular actress Zhao Tao delivers an expertly delicate and moving performance, as she looks for her husband. The film, however, is not without humor or a sense of hope. A Chow Yun-fat imitator and a young boy smoking cigarettes and singing loud, plaintive love songs add levity. Jia also adds some nice fantasy touches as well. A must see, and more than worth your $18 ticket.

2 Days in Paris (Julie Delpy): This would-be romantic comedy came off as even more insufferable than it would have if I hadn't seen it after Jia's masterful film. This film is the polar opposite, with a strained and often quite nasty sense of humor. Outside of a few chuckles from Delpy's costar Adam Goldberg (who apparently improvised much of his dialogue), this is an ineptly made and quite unattractive film that panders way too often to a film festival crowd that likes to consider itself sophisticated and superior. A scene with a bunch of Americans wearing Bush-Cheney T-shirts is a typical example of Delpy's propensity for cheap targets and easy laughs. Delpy only succeeds here in inviting unfavorable comparisons with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. With films such as Jia's and others in the festival which grapple with, literally, life and death issues, the spectacle of privileged white people whining about their incredibly trivial problems seems almost obscene.