Plataforma

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.

"Zhantai" has so many of the features I have admired from recent Oriental masterworks such as " A Brighter Summer Day", "Eureka" and "City of Sadness" that I will have to find some justification for considering it ultimately so much less satisfying. Like these others it succeeds in creating a complete world of its own that, because it is so remote from Western experience, exerts a fascination that is hard to forget. We are in Fenyang a small town somewhere West of Beijing, where flat plains give way to craggy, uninviting mountains. The time is the early 1980s when strict Maoist ideology was about to give way to a period of consumer liberalisation. A group of young actor-singer- dancers employed by the state to remind provincial audiences of the principles of Mao through the medium of stage entertainment are about to see their world fall victim to the progress of private enterprise, when no longer needed for government propaganda. What was once a captive audience turns fickle, often rejecting outright the new form of pop culture they are offered. The irony is that progress in this context brings disillusionment resulting in a group of friends drifting away from their close initial camaraderie. By the time the film ends their future looks far from confident. Both thematically and atmospherically "Zhantai" has the potential for great cinema. Why then after two viewings in quick succession do I find its sense of communication so elusive and uninvolving? The answer must lie in the way the director seems to distant his characters from their audience. We never get closer to them than a middle shot. In a film where the close-up is as rigorously excluded from cinematic grammar as camera movement from the later work of Ozu, the characters' everyday lives seem to be presentad as an extension of their existance on stage to the extent that we are often left to guess at their feelings and emotions. I have written before of how fascinated I am to respond to the demands of directors such as Edward Yang and Hou Xiaoxian to connect with characters and situations when given the barest information. Director Jia Zhangke is obviously aiming at their oblique narrative style but somehow gives so little that by the end I felt I knew much more about the topography of Fenyang than of the characters that live there. For a film about the effect of historical change on individuals to be completely successful it needs to be the other way round.

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.

It is kind of sad to read these sad comments about being "bored" with this wonderful film, or "not understanding the characters".

This film is so full of atmosphere, and yes, emotion... but it is not shoved down your throat with typical Hollywood dramatic tricks... it is something you have to have the time and will to discover. That makes is so much closer and valuable.

Film IS about seeing, and the fact that there are hardly any close-ups in this film gives our eyes the freedom to discover things in the frame. It is also, I believe a much more respectful way to film actors generally.

This is a great film, I hope we see many more from this young director!