24 City

I finally watched this film from beginning to end, after seeing pieces of it from various TV channels.

First of all, I want to remind viewers that the loss of employment due to the closure of a factory or business, and the resulting hardship for the affected, is a global problem and not unique to China. Economic vicissitudes are simply a fact life, and no country can be an exception to this rule. So any suggestion that Director Jia intended to hide the magnitude of the impact to the laid off employees of the closed down factory is a mute point.

As with his other works, this film requires the utmost in patience. Long takes of interviewees, played by the actual characters themselves or substituted by professional actors, convey the fineness in human emotion of the affected characters.

The film is about lives of very ordinary Chinese people in an evolving economy. Some young, some middle-aged, and some old. It explores human emotion - mostly the good side of it. It was about love neglected over time, or over mundane day-to-day obligations. The beautiful factory worker role played by Joan Chen is an interesting one - she was the prettiest of the bunch and yet a failure in finding love. Great acting from Ms. Chen for this short role.

In short, I enjoyed the film as I did with 'Still Life'. So when you are in the mood for some serious cinema or have the interest for a glimpse into life in contemporary China, get this DVD and let Jia Zhang Ke tell you the stories of these ex-factory workers. Your patience will be rewarded.

This movie is by far his best IMHO. The flow is engaging and natural while the 'empty' spaces in between narrations are not unlike those quiet passages in Chopin's piano pieces or the white spaces in the classic Chinese paintings.

I used to think Joan Chen only as a pretty face. But her performance here, even though short, changed my view completely. She can really act and act well! And she's still beautiful more than ever. Gawd bless her! The other pro actresses have proved their mastery in acting long ago and didn't disappoint here either.

But the most credit has to go to the writer/director Jia - these short stories never really intertwine with each other as a plot, but together they are so strong and compelling that makes any smart and coy plot pale in comparison. Jia again nailed the pulse of the real life drama right on without wasting much of anything.

I can't help but feel sympathetic to those who can't get 'it' because of the lack of background knowledge about the modern China. Only it's ironic, or even rather sad that, for such an iconic Chinese master movie maker with such a quintessential Chinese story telling, only found his fame mostly outside China today.

Once a famous jazz critic wrote that if you remove all the names of the white jazz players from its history, you haven't changed jazz a single bit. IMHO, by the time the outside world gets tired of the curiosity of Jia, over time his mastery will establish itself in China and only then will he find his real audience.

Zhang Ke Jia's 24 City has an unusually oblique narrative, mostly told through a series of interviews that initially seem to have little connection to one another. As the film goes on, narrative threads begin to come together into a coherent whole. This narrative strategy is initially off putting but eventually yields dividends for the patient viewer.

The narrative has some interesting things to say about Chinese culture, which Zhang depicts as quite rigid with little mobility economically or geographically for most people. At the same time, people's situations aren't particularly stable as several workers talk about suddenly losing their jobs through no fault of their own. In spite of a lack of external motivation, citizens are expected to be very internally motivated and express this through patriotic team fervor and self-sacrifice.

In spite of how inherently un-cinematic the interviews (which make up the majority of this film) are, Zhang is able to bring his mastery of the medium to bear and 24 City ultimately transcends this limitation. One way he does this is to surround each interview segment with scenes full of action, such as numerous factory sequences and one memorable early shot taken from a moving truck. He also makes the interviews themselves visually interesting in a couple of way. First, most of the interviews incorporate some sort of background movement, including one that has two men playing badminton and another that offers frequent glimpses of foot traffic. Secondly, each interview takes place in a carefully designed space that tends to be both full of detail and reflective of the unique characteristics of the interviewee. Finally, he uses camera movements quite carefully for emphasis throughout. Ultimately, 24 City is an example of how carefully employed cinematic techniques can make even material which initially seems quite humdrum and unsuited for film into a memorably viewing experience.

Even though this kind of movie isn't my cup of tea, I need to recognize that the stories of the lives that evolved around the factory are really touching. You can see the impact the Chinese government's decisions make on those people's lifes, and it was huge.

Yet, I could notice when there was real people that worked on the factory telling their stories, and the ones that were told by actors. And I think the movie could have pointed more about the economical prejudice that the ex-empolyees had after being dismissed.

Many people who lived on the city lost their jobs to give all of it to the wealthy. However, this was something really secondary during the film, and hadn't been given properly attention.

Not many Chinese films obtain a release in Western cinemas. Those that do tend to be set in the distant past and have large casts, colourful costumes and exciting action - think "Hero", "House Of Flying Daggers", "Curse Of The Golden Flower" and "Red Cliff". This is not one of those movies. "24 City" is contemporary in subject, pedestrian in pacing, and documentary in style (director Jia Zhang-ke uses a mix of real characters and actors including Joan Chen).

It is set in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, which I visited a few weeks before seeing the film and I took along two friends from Sichuan who know the city well. It tells the terribly sad tale of the closure of a factory, which once employed 4,000 workers on the manufacture of military hardware, so that the site can be used for a modern complex of apartments and hotels - the 24 City of the title.

The unusual part documentary/part fiction style - there are five authentic interviews and four fictional scenes delivered by actors - means that the work lacks the 'bite' of a real documentary and the narrative of full fiction, but the critics liked it.