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It took me almost three hours, finally I finished another film by Jia Zhang Ke's called "Platform." Now I have seen all three of his so called "hometown trilogy": "Xiao Wu," "Platform," and "Unknown Pleasures."

"Platform" tells stories of a group of young people in a small town in Shanxi Province in the 80s. China was emerging from the damage due to the 10 years long Cultural Revolution, and these young people rode the waves of the changes in the Chinese society searching for their positions in the new social structure.

Like Jia's other films, this film does a good job on capturing the details of the lives of the ordinary people, especially those on the very bottom of the society. But it's like a broken container trying to hold its ingredient together. You see those cooking materials are scattered around all over the place but they are never put together to make a delicious dish. It doesn't have a focus.

I am not sure if the film maker did it intentionally or because he was using those "non-professional" actors, the camera always stays far away from its object and it almost never gets a close up on these characters. It makes me a bystander to watch what happens to these characters standing in distance. It's very frustrating not to be able to get closer and get connected to those characters.

By the way, I have no idea why the director Jia Zhang Ke is so obsessed with this guy Wang Hong Wei. Wang is the lead actor in every one of Jia's film. I start to think that Wang is the mafia boss and has total control of Jia. Otherwise, how can I explain this phenomenon after I see most of Jia's films? This is an interesting film to check out, especially if you have the patience and time, but not a great film.

Platform ("Stage" might be a better translation)shows us the lives of a troupe of actors as China went from Maoism to markets, from 1980 to the 1990s. The treatment is sardonic and distant; we rarely see anyone in a closeup, and the point of view is as critical of liberalization (embodied in bad rock and go-go dancing) as it is of the cult of Mao (performed in the hilarious socialist-patriotic opera at the beginning of the movie). As Fassbinder said of the movies of Douglas Sirk, material objects--a brick wall, a pile of boards, a marketful of cheap clothing, bowls of noodles, embroidered slipcovers, copies of bellbottom pants, a truck, etc.--are at the center of the mise en scene, appropriately so, since the story is indeed about material changes. In fact the movie bears a lot of resemblance to Fassbinder's Marriage of Maria Braun, as both trace growing prosperity, consumerism, and personal alienation through a sequence of rooms, houses, relationships, and home furnishings. Provincial China moves from dirt, scarcity, and collectivism to a modest supply of consumer goods and more individual freedom/insecurity. This historical movement is intertwined with the characters' aging from their teens to middle age. There is no appreciable increase in human joy and happiness, nor a marked decrease either. This cold, distant treatment will not please some viewers.

The essence of the story is simple, though with multi-layered implications.

For the essence, the dialogue says it all : "Where is outer-Mongolia (the name used by the Chinese for Mongolia)?" "North of inner-Mongolia (a province of China)." "Which country lies north to the outer-Mongolia?" "Russia." "Still north?" "The ocean." "What is beyond that?" "Fenyang, your home town." . The essence is "nowhereness".

The members of the state-owned vaudeville group were supposed to be the cultural elites of the town, with most of the peasants illiterate, intellectually bleak, and with no appreciation for art. They could perform ballet, opera, various instruments, and flamenco. But they were tied to the peasants, for they were the tools for the government to please and entertain the grassroots of its support. They had all the longing for a brave new life that would suit their values, ideologies, and aesthetics, but they did not know how to act. Though they were given the eye for a better life, they were deprived of the chance to live it. They still lived as the peasants, eking out a meager living. Both the inaction on their behalf and the innate determinant posed by the social reality for their inaction constitutes the "nowhereness" for the semi-intellectuals.

All they ever had was a moment of pleasure and inspiration by art and an everlasting bitterness and backbreaking excruciation imposed by the actual living that goes nowhere and has no end.

The life of the masses is another layer of the "nowhereness". It is no doubt that the change in China during the '80s were profound. The Big Brother abandoned the central planning economy along with the ideology that acted as the appurtenance. A new kind of exploitation took the place of the old one, and the peasants (the masses) were still nowhere to be the beneficiaries. The illusory glory of contributing to the nation in the totalitarian state made way for the cheap and coarse consumer products in the national capitalism. The difference between the masses and the elite is that the masses never knows and never has the urge to know the truth. They were already consumed and wasted by the effort to sustain their mere existence. Leisure and education are never on their side. In the new world, they gained the return of a minute scrap from the spoils of the exploitation of their own sweat and blood, and lost the meaning of life with the peace of mind. They no longer has a direction or a cause. It is an every-man-for-himself scenario let loose in a country with 1.3 billion people. "Nowhereness" seems to be a result very much acceptable.

The last layer of the "nowhereness" is the nowhereness of the nation as a whole. The story of the Fenyang Town goes the same for the Chinese nation. The Jeffersonian-like ideal of the ancient empire was but yesterday's dream. The current China, dated back to mid-19th century, through its search for power, independence, and its own identity, has got used to the nation-wide mobilization, and consequently, with a constant change of plan, accidentally and successfully obliterated its own culture and identity. What is left is but the dregs of old memory and folklore. The nation's elite today could only satiate their quest for meaning with the ideas of the Western world that their forefathers labelled as barbarism one century and a half ago. As a culture entity, China is already lost.

A nation has thus lost itself.

It's an epical, relaxed, meandering, beautiful, rich, etc. laconic time portrayal of China's cultural history in the 80s, based on the fate of a theatre company. The protagonists are mostly "twen slackers" who wait for the artistic breakthrough, and director Jia follows their lives in mostly aloof, breathing tableaux. What in today's cinema Hou Hsiao-hsien achieves for space and Béla Tarr for time, is combined in here, without directly referring to both of them. Here, horrible tragedies (a divorce lacking any emotions) take place as well as not less horrible comedies (the mine workers contract: "Death and accident are acts of destiny. The firm will not take any responsibility."), but everything seems to be straightly taken from real life. The title 'Platform' alone already indicates the oddly depressing tone of the film. The desperate waiting, eternally postponed by short changes of perspective as a fundamental experience of a whole era. "We're standing on the platform and we're still waiting, waiting." Although, the film is set in the 80s, 'Platform' also brilliantly and perfectly captures the mood at the end of the 20th century: a rampant epos of never realised chances and daily travail. The film of the new millennium.

I definitely liked this film much better than Jia's Unknown Pleasures, his follow-up, but I still wouldn't call it great. Platform is a very amorphous film. Perhaps it has more meaning to those who might know the referents better than I, the various places in China which are visited. But the fact remains that the loose, repetitive, episodic structure mixed with the total lack of character development hinder much of the possible enjoyment or involvement. I know it's not cool for a certain sector of Chinese art films to allow the audience to give a crap what's going on. But, surprisingly, I did enjoy it to a fair extent. You kind of feel like you're part of the performance troupe in the film, that you're being carted between these sections of nowhere around the vast country. There are many beautiful scenes. It's worthwhile. I suggest, given its 2.5 hour running length, to watch it in bits and pieces. It won't feel quite as repetitive.