24 City

As a factory is torn down to make way for a snazzy modern apartment complex, a group of people connected with the factory share their thoughts on how it affected their lives. The film is wonderful aesthetically, with gorgeous compositions, lovely use of music, and a poetic air to it, assisted by actual snippets of poetry in the inter titles. Something of a companion piece to STILL LIFE, Jia explores the consequences of urban renewal, and how our city landscapes shape who we are. Most intriguingly, he obliterates the line between documentary and drama, to the point where it almost seems useless to distinguish between them. Like Herzog, he's shooting for an "ecstatic truth," one that reflects reality without necessarily sticking to it. For the most part, it's an effective and engaging technique. The most glaring exception is Joan Chen, whose is of course recognizable but also comes off a bit too "actor-y" and her performance feels out of place. And there's the added distraction of her playing a person who resembles Joan Chen. It's just too nudge-nudge wink-wink meta. It didn't work in OCEAN'S TWELVE and it doesn't work here. I found Tao Zhao's performance a little phony as well. But it's certainly an interesting piece of work, covering the breadth of humanity with just a handful of monologues, in stories both universal and specific, and often heartbreaking.

I was looking forward to this film as I know Chengdu quite well and the topic of the rapid changes in China society interests me a great deal. I was less than impressed with the only other film by Zhang Ke Xia I'd seen (The World), which seemed to me to be a clunking metaphor in search of a script, but I thought it still sounded promising. How wrong I was - I find myself mystified by the praise this film has been given.

It starts out so well, with some beautiful and moving interviews with retired workers from the factory, now moving out from Chengdu to an industrial estate to the suburbs (but we suspect of course that this is a fiction, the factory really is no more and the workers are disposable). The insight into what these workers thought of their jobs (they were highly prized) and the genuine pride they felt in their factory is moving and fascinating. But for whatever reason, the film then moves to using painfully obvious actors to read scripted lines. The actors are quite awful, using the pauses for effect and blank stares into the middle distance of amateur dramatic society volunteers. And they quite obviously people who've never been in a foundry in their lives (neither i suspect had the film makers, as the working foundry scenes were patently set up). I can't help see this as an obvious insult to the real workers, who presumably were not considered good looking or articulate enough to be in the film. The scripted stories they tell are so obvious and fake in comparison to the more sober recollections than the real people, its hard not to feel they were written for effect, not to create a real remembrance or to provide some sort of deeper truth (which is usually the excuse of film makers trying to justify short cuts and showy technique). I can only wonder what those people who were interviewed and poured their hearts out would think to see tiny scraps of their personal stories told by some patently bored flown in actors.

The rest of the film is pretty much standard documentary work, with little real feel or imagination in its telling. The photography fails miserably to convey the genuine grandeur of those old industrial buildings and makes no attempt to tell us what the new 24city will look like, apart from a brief moment showing us the model for the new complex. No attempt whatever is made to tell us a bit more about the mechanics of what is actually happening or how the former workers will be treated. The juxtaposition of hardy old industrial workers and the somewhat vapid younger generation is rather obvious and clichéd, it doesn't actually tell the viewer anything new or interesting.

I can't help thinking that this film would never have gotten its release if it had been made by a less exalted film maker. I strongly suspect that for whatever reason (pressure by the government?), the original film was altered significantly, forcing the use of actors and its lack of any concrete reference to the present or future for these people. If this is the case, then it should have been scrapped, not presented as the farrago it is.

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.

This review is primarily in response to Barry Freed's, whose take on the film is so wildly different from mine it makes me wonder if we saw the same movie.

I LOVED this movie. I think the quasi-documentary style is wholly winning and adds a lot to the story. As far as defending Jia's decision not to do a "traditional" documentary, I guess I just have to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he had wanted to do a "traditional" documentary, then he would have done so. I feel that Jia is an accomplished enough artist that I can assume he has an instinctive sense of what will best serve a particular story. Clearly, in this instance, he decided on a fact/fiction "blend", and to my mind, he made the right call.

While watching this, I couldn't help but think of Werner Herzog and his theory of "ecstatic truth" ("I know that by making a clear distinction between "fact" and "truth" in my films, I'm able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct." - W. Herzog). While I'm not (necessarily) making a comparison between Zhang-ke and Herzog, I feel that they are very much after the same thing. Whether an essential truth can be best conveyed using actors or non-actors, using a documentary or drama approach, etc. are questions that both directors obviously struggle with, and I feel that they have come to similar conclusions. They (to my mind) have opted to fuse the two approaches, in an attempt to remove intellectual and emotional barriers between the people on-screen and the people in the audience. And more often than not, that approach works, and works in a very powerful way.

Finally, I thought the performances, without exception, were utterly devastating and mind-blowing. I don't know what Jia does to his actors to get performances of that caliber, but whatever it is, he needs to keep it up. I think this is an excellent companion-piece to "Still Life", and a beautiful addition to his body of work. Masterful.

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.