Director Jia Zhang Ke has established himself as world cinema's poet laureate of boredom. In "Platform" - his meandering look at a group of teenage theatre performers in post-Mao China - he delivered a 155-minute film about the ennui produced by Communism's monolithic restrictions of personal freedom.
In "Unknown Pleasures", he updates much the same theme to the new millennium, but with a far more accessible narrative.
Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) and Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) are unemployed teenagers. Moping around town with nothing to do all day except smoke, their lives are completely aimless. After Xiao Ji falls in love with disinterested dancer Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), he discovers that the real power lies in the dollar bill, not Communism.
Keeping a tighter reign on the action than he did in the far more turgid "Platform", Jia Zhang Ke delivers what may well be his finest work to date.
Building on the expressive performance of Wu Qiong (whose blank stare, hunched shoulders and impassive stance is entrancing in its sheer lack of activity) through the use of long, static takes, "Unknown Pleasures" suggests that contemporary China is stalled somewhere between Communism and capitalism, caught in a crushingly endless cycle of repetition.
As in "Platform", mobility offers one chance of escape, but the trips the boys take on their motorbikes simply underscore just how trapped they are, taking them into a worn-out industrial landscape of wasteland and rubble that's been ruined by decades of Communist rule.
The only hope is sex (and possibly love). But, as the title suggests, these pleasures remain unknown, leaving the characters desperate for the joys of capitalism (Zhang Ke even makes hilariously ironic references to both "Pulp Fiction" and Asia's bootleg DVD market), while unaware that the dollar might not be enough to save them. Impressive filmmaking.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
"Unknown Pleasures" is released in UK cinemas on Friday 11th July 2003.
Unknown Pleasures (Ren Xiao Yao) (2003)
