The World

If you want to get an aesthetic view on modern China, this is an excellent vehicle. Over two hours long, some scenes are poetic and subtle with an Eastern beauty lovely to behold. English sub-titles are well done.

A big screen experience of common workers from the countryside and the artistic dance community in the big city of Beijing.

There is a lot of smoking... and cell phone use, of course - this is the new China.

Some animation sequences provide creative transitions of scenes.

Not for the adrenaline junkie addicted to violence.

Excellent portrayal of relationships. A true artist behind the camera. The acting is so natural.

The backdrop and chapters are structured around the different national landmarks at the World Theme Park in Beijing.

( 8/10 )

"The World (Shijie)" is one of the saddest films I've ever seen and is a moving visualization of the tragedy of rising expectations.

While it is set very particularly in China, it achingly proves the universality of the twin globalization pulls of modernization and immigration over the past three hundred years around the world, recalling films from "Hester Street" to "The Emigrants (Utvandrarna)," and films about cities in throes of developmental change, like "Atlantic City."

These are universally recognizable young people - they rebel against and yet feel tied to their families and regretfully break ties with old friends; they fight with their siblings but bail them out; they get lonely, a bit homesick, and bored; they are jealous and ambitious; and they constantly compromise, particularly the women bargaining with the oldest currency. With what is a bit heavy-handed symbolism, the film is specifically set in what I presume is a real amusement park called "The World" on the outskirts of Beijing that replicates landmarks in scaled miniature and focuses on the employees and their extended, inter-connected network of friends and family.

At first, they look to us as swaggering city sophisticates, as they dress-up in international costumes for a park revue, surrounded by emblems of international commercial culture, like fake Louis Vuitton bags and movie posters, such as of "Titanic," They jealously and zealously call each other constantly by the most modern cell phone and text messengers, particularly from the encircling monorail that at first seems like a symbol of modern technology, but is really cobbled together from airplane parts--though one woman wistfully notes that she doesn't know anyone who has been on a plane- a frequent response to a call is "I'm on the train." -- but by the end the canned voice of progress is emblematic of the dead end circularity of their lives as they can't get passports to leave, let alone to see the real landmarks.

Travel is a constant theme visually and of conversation - when a country bumpkin shows up, the surprised greeting is "How did you get here?" such that "I bought a ticket." is not self-evident. -- to the security guards riding camels around the fake pyramids and horses around the fake castles, to the six hour bus ride it takes to another city to pay off a relative's gambling debts, and emphasized through fanciful animated interstices. The ironic geographical headings of the chapters emphasize a character's quixotic goal -- "world.com", "Ulan Bator Evening," "Belleville", "Tokyo Story." Striving as they all are, for these folks even Ulan Bator, the depressed capital of Mongolia, looks like a step up.

There are moving scenes when immigrants with different languages try to communicate to share the commonalities in their lives -- a Russian immigrant is terrified when her passport is taken away, while the Chinese woman is envious that she even has one.

It is a bit confusing keeping up with the various characters, in and out of their work costumes, especially when the two main characters seemed to change so much without explanation, but they are enormously sympathetic so it is devastating as we see their hopes and dreams, however unrealistic or selfish, defeated. And those who succeed do so on very compromised terms.

They are also not very articulate, which writer/director Zhang Ke Jia compensates for by spending a lot of time slowly setting up individual scenes and watching people interact, as we see how different they are in different contexts with different people, as body language becomes more important than words, whether spoken or in text messages.

While the cinematography was beautiful, the print I saw in New York was a bit scratchy and the English subtitles had several misspellings. I'm sure subtitle-dependent viewers lose a lot of the significance of different accents and regional differences among the employees from all over China.

A friend of mine says that his defining image of modern China is of a marble facade slapped onto a jerry-built wall; and it's this kind of picture that also emerges from 'The World', a touching movie about the lives of a group of workers in a Beijing theme park in which all the planet's tourist attractions are copied in a single location. Beautifully acted, the film provides an interesting insight into the patterns of behaviour of young Chinese; but the underlying tone is melancholic, and this flavour grows stronger as the story progresses; in some ways, it's a tale about the death of hope. But it's done with a light touch, some striking photography and some nicely realised animated interludes. I found it moving and subtle, and ultimately, very sad.

"See the world without leaving Beijing."

Maybe in America a theme park based on recreating various monuments from around the world would be seen as representing a mix of consumerism and cultural arrogance. In the real-life Beijing World Park that we see in this film, it seems to signal modernization, but at the same time, isolation from the world, and a certain falseness. That falseness can be seen in several other things - faking politeness in awkward social situations, the cheesy tourist photos in front of the model of the Leaning Tower, and believing in commitment and love with another person (the relationships in the film are all strained). Even the choreographed, glitzy dance routines might be seen in a different light. The characters are for the most part earnest and humble, but quietly give off a feeling of longing and desire for something more (maybe the desire to have the ability to break free and see the real world?), and I loved how director Jia Zhangke added the graphic art in fantasy sequences to help emphasize that. The visuals throughout the film are strong as well, but what I was impressed by most was the acting. So many of these scenes truly feel real. The one where the elders accept an insurance payout for their son's death is simply extraordinary, and immensely touching. Overall though, the film was a little slow and sedate for my taste (especially for its length), so it was a near miss for me, but fans of realism will probably like it more.

Though this movie is to some extent, demanding on the audience, a little patience and decent memory will leave you spellbound after the movie. I do warn that if you don't have the patience for books such as The Idiot, don't watch it. Otherwise, I'm sure it will be enjoyable. Jiangke takes the candor of Yasujiro Ozu's dramas and removes kindness, whimsicality, and love and replaces these with loneliness, harshness, and austerity. Powerful combination. The lead actress acts in a way that seems to forget that it's being filmed for a movie. The level of focus on her part is astounding to me. This is in fact true for the entire cast. The irony of the movie lies in its title: The World - a word that conveys a sense of endless possibility. What you get is quite the opposite - in fact the characters seem to be confined by such a level of endless impossibility that the throughout the film, I found myself fearing an imminent gunfight. That never came but the end is equally, if not, more shocking.