| `PLATFORM' EVOKES A DECADE OF CHANGE IN CHINA |
| Boston Globe |
| - Saturday, January 26, 2002 |
| Chris Fujiwara, Globe Correspondent |
|
Platform Written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke With: Wang Hong Wei, Zhao Tao, Liang Jing Dong, Yang Tian Yi Running time: 155 minutes At: Museum of Fine Arts In Cantonese and Mandarin, with English subtitles Unrated |
| In "Platform," a film about a troupe of traveling performers touring the provinces of China from 1979 to 1989, everything important happens off-screen. The characters never witness big political speeches or historic world events. Even in their own relationships and careers, the turning points take place almost without their noticing. And over the course of the story, everything changes within and around them. They never ask why. Director Jia Zhang-ke has found a way to say something about history while dealing only with how history is lived by people who are not political. The result is a film to place beside such masterpieces about time, change, aging, and loss as Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons" and Terence Davies's "The House of Mirth." |
| For much of "Platform," the focus is on young actor Cui Mingliang
(Wang Hong Wei) and his relationships with two actresses. But the main character
of the film is the group, and the main theme is its shifting fortunes. As
traveling artists, the characters of "Platform" form an elite, more sensitive
than many in their society to cultural trends such as bell-bottoms, perms,
and Western-style pop music. But as liberalization reaches the countryside,
the actors are no more immune than their audiences to the social and economic
shifts of which changing fashions are just symptoms.
Jia evokes the sadness of life lived for a future that never comes. A deep but barely acknowledged disappointment is the outcome of Mingliang's relationship with one of the actresses - a relationship he expects will turn into love, but that doesn't. The film needs its length to make its points and achieve its emotional impact (although, to appease distributors, the director cut it from 193 to 155 minutes). Individual shots are also long, with the camera usually at some distance from the characters. People appear small, undistinguished, somewhat lost, as they try to make themselves comfortable in toneless public spaces or to orient themselves amid brick fortresses, distant mountains, and fields of snow. Jia's visual delicacy enables him to evoke not just life itself, but life turning into memory images. Just as crucial to the film are the constant sounds from unseen sources such as radios, loudspeakers, buses, and trucks - the rumble, crackle, and hum of history. Suggestive of remembered experience, these noises seem to come not just from off-screen space but from off-screen time - out of the past. One of the epiphanies of "Platform" is the scene in which a former actress, now a provincial bureaucrat, dances alone to a radio in her office. Her yellow sweater, moving against the bleakness of her surroundings (dark, gleaming file cabinets, a hanging fluorescent light), seems to absorb all the light from them, becoming a symbol of beauty. In the context of this subdued film, which features few scenes of the troupe performing, the actress's dance is a rare affirmation of art and an expression of nostalgia. In its last third, the film traces a draining of optimism as subtle as the draining of the main characters' youth. They and seemingly the whole society have lost their faith - without anyone ever talking about it. |