The World

The World, written and directed by Jia Zhangke, appears on a few lists I've seen of the best of the 2000s. I found it mostly engaging and interesting, but as with much high-toned Asian cinema, I also found it a little slow. My experience with much Asian cinema is that it either too dull or too over the top.

The film is set in a real theme park in Beijing that reproduces the great landmarks of the world on a smaller scale. There's an Eiffel Tower, a Taj Mahal, a Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc. As one employee puts it, standing in front of a Manhattan skyline, "The twin towers went down on September 11, 2001. But we still have it." In some ways it's akin to the Las Vegas Strip, but without the gambling or the irony.

The main characters are two employees, a dancer (Zha Tao) and her boyfriend, a security guard (Chen Taisheng). They have not consummated their relationship, and he presses her to do so, while also being intrigued by a more worldly girl who works in the fashion industry. Tao makes friends with a Russian girl who also works at the park, but she has to leave and later we find that it's because she has been forced into prostitution (I cringed at an early scene in which the Russian girls are relieved of their passports by their handler--girls, never give up your passports). There are also subplots involving Chen's friends from the province he grew up in, who take construction jobs, and a dancer who has an obsessively jealous boyfriend.

What lurks behind the somewhat melodramatic plot is an examination of the new China and its economic system. The world is represented in microcosm in the theme park, but it also represented by the world of the film--the world is flat, and it's also very small. A short tram ride is all that separates the pyramids of Egypt from St. Peter's in Rome, both literally and figuratively. The importation of women as sexual slaves, the swallowing up of boys from the country in the big city, and the inevitable creep of capitalism into the totalitarian Chinese state are all displayed here.

Again, as with In the Mood for Love, I found the film disengaged emotionally. If there's anything I've learned about jotting down my thoughts about film on this blog, is that ideas aren't interesting in narrative cinema without interesting characters, and this film is short of them. The actors do well, but there's just a bit too much inscrutability. Maybe my diet has been ruined by too much white bread.