The World

Directed and written by Jia Zhangke. With Zhao Tao, Chen Taishen, Jing Jue. A Zeitgeist Films release (139 minutes). In Mandarin and Shanxi dialect with English subtitles.

It ought to be unnecessary to mention the things that could have gone wrong with The World in the hands of a lesser director. But to avoid misunderstanding, let's admit that in choosing to make a film about people who work at the World Park - a theme park outside Beijing that boasts simulacra of such landmarks as the lower-Manhattan skyline, the Eiffel Tower, and the Great Pyramid of Egypt – Jia Zhangke runs some risks. Since the World Park comments on itself by its mere existence, further commentary is threatened with redundancy. Also, the dominant commercial cinema has been so glib in trading in the postmodernism of placenessness, from Blade Runner to Baz Luhrmann to Batman Returns , that for an art filmmaker outside the Hollywood orbit to enter this market is to risk a certain impotent cuteness.

Three options are obvious at once, and equally banal: to celebrate, in the smirking Broadway-for-the-multiplex manner of Chicago or Moulin Rouge , the glitzy surfaces of the simulated world while mocking the suckers whom these surfaces deceive; to appeal to a despairing humanism by showing individual lives crushed under the heel of globalization; or to appease a more sentimental humanism by showing how in spite of everything, people adapt, muddle through, and make the globalized world their home.

Now The World does all three of these things, but in reverse. The film doesn't neutralize (how could it?) a smug, derisive response to the falseness of the theme park and to the modest pride its workers take in their closeness to the world's monuments. But the visual design of the film is a deterrent to any easy ironizing. Throughout the film, Jia photographs the simulacra as part of the distant background, as seen from the trains that shuttle his characters around or behind their backs as they talk to each other on half-deserted platforms. Because of this strategy, the global theme park becomes more than just a display or the object for a hip audience's derision. This world is close but far, real but empty, stable but uncomfortable. Jia provides a long-shot view of individuals placed in, and against, the vast spaces of history – the same view (now expanded by CinemaScope) with which he built a previous masterpiece, Platform (2000).

Like the protagonists both of that film and of its excellent follow-up, 2002's Unknown Pleasures , some of the main characters of The World are performers. Jia's view of performance is close to that of Ophuls in Lola Montes or Sirk in Imitation of Life : Jia's performers are trapped rather than liberated by the stage machines to which they lend their bodies but not their souls. They're glorified service personnel in kitschy uniforms, not expressive artists. Yet it's through performance – specifically, the gift of a song – that two characters of The World manage to communicate with each other: Tao (Zhao Tao), a young dancer from Northern China, and Anna (Alla Chtcherbakova), a Russian dancer for whom employment at the theme park turns out to be a stop on the way to prostitution. In the song of Ulan Bator that Anna teaches Tao, The World finds the possibility of an authentic culture. The cell-phone text messages with the film's characters keep in touch point to a similar possibility, and Jia privileges the world-apart nature of these communications by accompanying them with short animations. Yet Jia also sees the cell phone as a surveillance device, in the subplot of a jealous boyfriend who gets enraged when he can't keep tabs on his dancer girlfriend.

Confronting globalization and technologies of instantaneity, Jia achieves a rich ambiguity and a complexity of point of view that make The World satisfying and unsettling. The World creates an experience that's epic and unresolved, in which there's wholeness but no contrived balance or symmetry, and in which, behind the characters' personal struggles, distances of time, space, and scale loom constantly, neither affirming nor annihilating, as challenges and reference points. It's a region of experience for which Asian cinema has long had a special affinity, and with Platform , Unknown Pleasures , and now The World , Jia has established himself as one of this area's most creative explorers.

Published in the Boston Phoenix, August 26, 2005