O Mundo

"The World" is set in the tacky eponymous Beijing theme park and details the lives of the alienated young workers who are spiritually and physically trapped there. It's a subtle, delicate, yet powerful film with a directing style that can best described as artfully unobtrusive. The young director/writer is a master of composition, camera movement and sound. Some of the scenes unspool without editing for several minutes, the camera mostly still, sometimes moving with the action but never on the whim of the filmmaker. Sound and dialogue occur off-screen in a way that reminds one of the great Japanese director Ozu. (Indeed, one of the film's inter-titled chapters is called "Tokyo Story".

One of the best examples of this style is a grimy hotel room scene between the lead couple in which very little happens--an attempted seduction, but no sex--that is so authentic it feels almost voyeuristic to watch. In another scene, a father counts and pockets four stacks of money bestowed to him by the authorities for the accidental death of his son, his face an expressionless mask that hides more pain than could ever be shown. In an opening scene the camera tracks a female dancer running through a theatre backstage, pleading for a band aid she will never get--thus slyly presaging the untreatable tragedies that will eventually unfold.

The central characters are so alone, alienated and unable to communicate in any meaningful way--much of the dialogue is spoken into the ubiquitous cellphones--that the closest any two people come together are two woman--one Chinese, the other Russian--who don't speak a word of each other's language.

This is the best kind of social commentary a film can offer, images that show and don't tell. At times it feels plodding--especially the last half hour--some of the characters could use more development, and the animated cellphone sequences seem unnecessary and distracting. But the depiction of contemporary urban China's deepening social malaise--the result of far too rapid urbanization and unchecked Westernization--is troubling enough to make one fear the country's--and the world's--future.

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.

While fifth generation Chinese directors Zhang Yimou succumbed to crowd pleasing, turning out cheap, hollow, showy crap like Flying Dagger, sixth generation Jia Zhangke continues to remain faithful to making movies that reflect the sometimes painful metamorphosis the Chinese populace is going through at the crossroad of modernization. The World is such a recent attempt, although there are comments that this movie has already treaded across the line of commercialism.

"The World" here is a miniature world theme park which might be a novelty to Beijing but not the modernized parts of the world (there was one en route from Toronto to Niagara Falls over three decades ago, albeit at a smaller scale). The story evolves around dancer Xiao Tao (ZHAO Tao) and her boyfriend Tiasheng (CHEN Tiasheng). (While the actor conveniently adopted his real name for the character, Tao in the movie means "peach" while Tao in the actress means "waves", two entirely different words). Through the daily lives in the park (part of which is still under construction) and visits from various friends and relatives of the two main characters, we are exposed to how people interact, think, perceive, love, and more. Many of the sequences and dialogue are so realistic and real that you would wonder if these are simply people in the street asked by director Jia to stand in front of the camera (but some distance away) and converse the way they normally do.

The storytelling is straightforward and efficient, sometimes to the point of being skeletal. The camera is objective, impassionate and some may even call it dull. As if to make up for it, director Jia interspersed the script with animations, sometimes to mark off short episodes, each separately titled.

Not for the general audience, The World has an air of the rough-diamond kind of crudeness that makes it quite appealing to seekers of less main-stream cinemas. I do find it a little too long, even when I watched a two-hour version rather than the 140 minute version billed in the IMDb listing.

"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.