The World
Written and directed by Jia Zhangke
Zeitgeist
2005
Rating:


At the age of 35, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has already made three internationally acclaimed masterpieces — "Xiao Wu" (1997), "Platform" (2000) and "Unknown Pleasures" (2002) — so he can be forgiven if his fourth effort, "The World," is something of a slackening of his breakneck pace. The characters in Jia's movies are always longing to leave their isolationist communities to see the world, though they probably don't mean Beijing's World Park, the setting of Jia's latest film. Like Disney's Epcot Center, World Park is the world in microcosm, except far tackier. "The Twin Towers were bombed on Sept. 11, but we still have them!" one employee boasts, pointing to the park's miniature Manhattan. More poignantly, Tao (Zhao Tao) and Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) go for magic carpet ride through the park, their stationary flight recorded on digital camera and then "green-screened" to make it look as if they're hovering above the park.

The irony of "The World," at least as seen within the context of Jia's oeuvre, is that his characters here can, in a way, go to New York, India, Egypt, London, Italy or France any time they want, though the sense of ennui is intensely more suffocating than before. Connection to "the other world" is so longed for that when someone receives a text message, the film launches into a brief animated interlude. World Park may oppress and bore its citizens to the point where emotion is finally leeched from them by design, but it also prevents the Shakespearian collection of lovers at various stages of their relationships from ever containing real passion and stifles the tragedy of one of the film's most endearing characters. Jia's long-shots and carefully framed compositions contain as many characters as possible. The final irony may be that neither World Park nor Jia's camera can make the characters feel connection in "The World."

Posted Saturday, July 30, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/the.world