Unknown Pleasures/Xiao Wu [DVD]

Datong,an industrial city in Shanxi province,the film opens with Bin Bin riding his motorbike into it in the opening shots.The new dawn of globalization shows the opening up of this outpost to Beijing, the new motorway,the internet and karaoke,like splinters of frivolous violence,bringing sensuality into the industrial monochrome.The two main characters,Bin Bin and Xiao Ji, are our slacker representatives,both unemployed,looking for work, women or unknown pleasures.They don't so much talk,as move,listen or react,to those moments which are important to them or hard to forget.Director Jia Zhang-Ke made this film after making a documentary here,drawn to the idea of a post-planned economy, the feelings of bleakness and abandonment of old,shabby,closed up and broken-down factories,as the perfect symbol of these young people's condition.Both Bin Bin and Xiao are teenagers,drifting dreamers inhabiting public spaces,where lottery is broadcast on speakers,young people lounge about smoking or playing cards,playing pool in pool halls,people watch TV or sing karaoke.The young men having nothing much to do all day,idle around,go around on their motor-bikes,to fill in the boredom of their days.As children of unemployed parents,their prospects are dismal.Disaffected and without ambition.they have time on their hands to hang out,dreaming of girls and escape.The encroaching globalization comes through the TV,China and the Olympics,an explosion in a textile plant,the collision of US and Chinese planes,the entry of China into the WTO.Xiao Ji chases Quiao Quiao,a dancer-cum-singer-cum-prostitute,despite her boyfriend,a local pimp and gangster and being roughed up by his goons.He says he'll soften her like instant noodles.Bin Bin sits watching TV,holding hands with his scholarly girlfriend,who wishes to work at WTO.His mother nags him to join the army to get him away from her,but he fails the medical and generally gets drunk.This film covers the `1 child' generation,whose lonelness and empty lives are captured by the digital video,to allow constant, fluid camera movement within extended takes.Western values and culture drift in via pop music and pirate DVD.In one scene Xaoi Ji,in a restaurant with Quao Quao,recalls a scene from Pulp Fiction,where a couple hold up a restaurant and the film cuts to them dancing in a disco when he shouts,"Freeze!"The failure of a planned economy is shown in rubbled wasteland.Hopelessness and isolation are perpetually moving.A song is continually played `Unknown Pleasures':"I follow the wind,I'm carefree and happy".Bin Bin tells his girlfriend there's no future,all that's' open is the present moment,neither past nor future.His girlfriend circles around him on her bike to get him to come with her.Quao Quao quotes to Xiao Ji, Dhuangzi,the philosopher,you should only do what feels good.Jia sends the narrow field of Chinese culture up,by having a punter ask Bin Bin whether he sells Xiao Wu or Platform pirated DVDs,2 of his previous films.Jia works outside the system,covering the capitalist phase of post-communism.The two friends hatch a plan to rob a bank,knowing they'll fail,not having found the unknown pleasures.Bin Bin is forced to sing a song(that song!) by a policeman.Xiao Ji is shown trying to kickstart his motor-bike as he climbs a hill several times.He is last seen riding his motor-bike until it breaks down on the road while it rains.He hails a bus,leaving the bike behind.Jia is not interested in story,but showing what he feels about time and life,things inexpressible in words,moments we can't see.Unknown pleasures remain unknown.

Unknown Pleasures offers thrills and spills galore with the plot being almost as substantial as the script. Set to the exciting backdrop of the construction of the Beijing-Datong motorway, the film explores the bits of society so often neglected in modern films: the bits where not much happens. You will be amazed at the scene in which the camera is quite steady despite being on a bus. You'll be intrigued by the sub-plot to get an American dollar exchanged to RMB. And in one scene you will be left thinking that the chair looks quite comfy. It's a cinematic extravaganza you won't want to miss! The film is 107 minutes long, but seems more like an hour and fifty. This is the kind of film which Spielberg would be unable to make, so fans of the genre will not be disappointed.

Two films from Director Jia Zhang Ke: both dissect the nature of adolescence and exclusion in a China undergoing rapid political and economic change. Both films - and his first bigger budget "Platform" - focus on the lives of young people in Jia's hometown of Fenyang, in Shanxi Province, China. Made on a low budget and without official sanction, these are rapidly shot, underground productions. While Jia's films have attracted critical acclaim across the world, they were denied a screening in China.In "Unknown Pleasures" we follow the chaotic boredom of two young men trying to establish relationships and fill the hours. Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are of the 1980's generation in China, the era of the single-child policy and the national attempt at demographic engineering. Jia blends the loneliness and isolation of the only child with the chaotic loss of identity and role which resulted from failed economic planning.Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are stranded in Fenyang, a dead-end, industrially decaying dump. They have no work, no money, no prospects, no future. When they should be growing, embracing the maturity and responsibility of adulthood - or at least enjoying the irresponsibility and rebellion of teenage - they seem trapped in an utterly sterile environment, weighed down by their own burden of hopelessness.Jia does not follow a Western narrative tradition - he admires Bresson, whose naturalistic techniques embraced silence and the real sounds of the everyday world. So Jia shoots silences, long passages of inaction between his actors. He argues that life does not follow a script; none of us knows what the next person will say or what our range of responses might be. So he shoots the burden and indecision of silence.Jia emphasises that boredom and isolation are a way of life. The two lads occupy a world which is dowdy and derelict, but there are constant messages on the TV to remind them of the outside world and its glamorous presence - encouragement to buy lottery tickets, propaganda about the success of China's Olympic bid, dire warnings of US imperialism ... and Mongolian King holding rehearsals for acts to perform as part of its advertising programme, selling alcohol.The Mongolian King sequences prefigure Jia's "Platform" (where young people perform as part of the State's propaganda machine). Here, they compete to work in a capitalist propaganda vehicle. Their acts are a blend of traditional Chinese influence and a pastiche of Western, teenage pop culture.These are the ultimate consumers - they can be persuaded to buy into anything, but their everyday life is a litany of consuming relationships, of making demands of the people around them. They live to consume, but have no apparent understanding of what constitutes happiness. Life is a mechanistic round of boredom, invigorated not by pursuit of pleasure, but by a desire to escape ennui, to find temporary diversion.There is no culture, only convention and the lure of notoriety through its rejection, only the pursuit of individuality and identity by becoming something else, someone else, a different person ... the same as others. When the two boys conceive of a robbery to solve their problems, they cannot imagine its consequences, only the gangster image they must present. Hollywood might romanticise and glamorise the criminal - the film makes references to 'Pulp Fiction' - but the reality is dowdy, inept, and self-defeating.Wang Hongwei appears in "Unknown Pleasures" as the character Xiao Wu. In the film, "Xiao Wu", he develops this petty criminal, a young man unable to escape his past and establish himself as a person of significance with a recognisable role, identity, and future.Crime is a casual act, one which must be repeated again and again. Xiao Wu is a pickpocket. He steals money; he also steals identity in the form of ID cards. He preys on the thousands of dispossessed who flood to the city in hope of work; he preys on those who come to sell or buy. But all the locals know he is a pickpocket - not even his best friend will invite him to his wedding.Xiao Wu runs a gang of juvenile thieves, taking commission on their thefts and insisting that they follow his instructions. He demands that they conform to his expectations, yet he proves unable to conform to the expectations of others. He tries to pose in different images - dutiful son, good friend, potential entrepreneur, even lover - but all collapse about him. The only identity which sticks is the image of his past.Jia constantly returns to images of performance in his films - images of people putting on acts, singing, dancing. Simply being is too complex and demanding a state - people have to perform to be noticed and valued, they have to portray roles and identities which others can admire, or at least enjoy. But many of Jia's performers are shambling and inept.Xiao Wu can't even perform as himself. He's a failure and his life is imploding. He needs to be anonymous in a big city if he is to be successful as a pickpocket, but the anonymity has been absorbed into his very bones - he has no idea who he is or where he wants to go.Jia Zhang Ke is an enigmatic filmmaker. The hand held camerawork, the low budget production, the long silences and naturalistic use of sound, the efforts to capture the burden of time and lack of identity experienced by his characters - all make his films slow paced and often confusing in structure. They are not specifically entertaining within a context of conventional narrative filmmaking.But Jia is making potent statements about people and their observation. His films deliver a political commentary on China, but they also offer insights into adolescence and the exclusion of young people from their own culture and the way the vacuum of their life is filled by imported images of glamour. They consume the illusion of style, they consume relationships and one another, but struggle to find an identity which is both coherent and self-fulfilling. They end up acting out performances which, rather than elevating them to significance, simply emphasise their inconsequence.Interesting films which have attracted much critical acclaim and which deserve to be viewed by a wider audience. Be prepared to concentrate, however. These are not performances into which you can intrude, casually.