Platform

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 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.

"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.

I found this to be an extremely understated film style, so emotionally detached throughout, a very oblique presentation, with little or no narrative, this played like a documentary with very little embellishments.

The film is set in the decade of the 1980's, which opens needing Communist Party approval for all State sponsored art, so kids are seen bored stiff at lifeless cultural performances singing the praises of China only in the most affirmative manner, something akin to pre-school exhibitions here, glorified by an always shining sun and by beautiful bright colors, but in this film, no one is fooled by this. Initial images are shot in near darkness or with the bleakest of light and there's a kind of feint, glowing aura surrounding such diminished light.

Initially there is obviously no heat or electricity in this cold, barren, wintry landscape, so each image features frost on the breath and the cold, desolate interior brick rooms, occasionally, people gather around a stove for warmth, they really don't want to move at all, bricks dominate the exteriors as well, the obvious poverty in the images is similar to many Iranian films, as there is absolutely nothing to grab the interest of the graduating high school class, who have no expectations of a better life, yet they are constantly seen interacting, but largely avoiding one another, smoking, staring off into the barren landscape, saying little or nothing, unbelievably detached from the rest of the world, and each other.



The imagery was quite unique, as this small town is, in fact, a rural Communist collective work farm, complete with required Party meetings where all are asked to voice their opinions or stand up to the critical discussions led by the Communist group leader, again, the decade opens with a criticism of individual dissent, like the wearing of bell-bottom pants, establishing an absolute need for individualism, which drives a whirlwind of changes within the Party, leading to the introduction of electricity to the most outer rural regions, and to concepts like privatization, owning your own farm, and, why not, western style pop music, which gives rise to an opportunity for this little group of would be artists to form a band and hit the road through some of the most desolate and empty terrain on the planet, always they travel on the back of the truck searching for the world outside.

Two of the most powerful images in the film, both very much in the Kiarostami-style end shot, a long, drawn out shot that by itself, reveals the story of the film...

There is a long shot of a group of rolling hills with nothing growing on them, round and bare, and the infamous truck winds it's way along a wind-swept, dirt road around a myriad of curves until it is finally close to the camera, but then the truck mysteriously stops, and turns around in the most deliberate and laborious manner before heading back into those rolling hills, while this is seen, the audience hears the sound of the truck radio providing a weather report, powerful, changing winds are heading their way...

There is a long, distant shot of this same, infamous truck and it appears to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, far off, in the distance, the sound of the engine gunning is all that's heard, but no wheels are turning, they ar e going nowhere, so there is a cut to the blue door of the truck, one of the artists climbs into the front seat and turns on the radio which plays the title song, "Platform," "We are waiting, our whole hearts are waiting, waiting forever..." In this unique moment, the first time rock music is heard in the film, the audience is made aware that from this barren desolation there are now "possibilities."

However, as the decade comes to a close, this image is contrasted against a later scene where the actual band plays this song, "Platform," and one can only describe it as laughable, the audience is throwing things at them, the lead singer attempts to go out into the crowd and touch hands but he is nearly beaten up until he retreats to the safety of the stage, yet still under the barrage of the audience, certainly this reflects the end of possibilities...

Yet another scene must be mentioned, one of their former girl friends who chose not to go on the road, but to stay at home, is seen alone in a bureaucratic office, again, dimly lit, she waters her plants in the corner, shuffles some papers around, but the music heard on the radio causes her to stir, she stops her routine, makes the briefest of moves as if she wants to dance, but stops herself, until this slowly evolves into one of the most beautiful traditional Chinese dances, alone, in the dark, dancing.

True to the peculiarity of this film, one character appears with the band, he has long black hair, and he's dressed all in black, the band manager tells him to get his lazy ass back to the group, as he's outside smoking a cigarette, one of the most prevalent images throughout the film is the constant smoking of cigarettes, but this guy never says a word to anybody, nor is he ever seen performing with the band, he just exists totally outside the universe of any known reality, later on, he is seen cutting his hair, this character is not seen in the entire film interacting with anyone, yet he is seen on the fringes definitely a unique character, but totally alone.

In many ways this is largely a wordless film, as the words are so meaningless, instead, eyes drift off into the distant landscape, and the sound of the film is filled with the noises of humans, street sounds, traffic, trucks, tractors, distant shouts or street chatter, radios, the noises of humans, this is really the theme of the film, the individuals are incidental, they come, they go, but the constant is the noise.