Art cinema is no less invested than Hollywood in the act of star-making. Take for example Jia Zhangke, whose career now seems marked by destiny. Charging through the 00s with a steady flow of extraordinary films, this precocious director quickly soared into the uppermost echelon of international auteurs, finally landing last year on the pages of his own New Yorker profile. The current wave of China fever has further cemented his role as the leading ambassador between his nation's underclass and the rarefied world of Western aesthetes, but reputation is a slippery thing. Since gaining approval from China's censorship board, Jia has begun to look more like a figure of the establishment, an image in conflict with that of the renegade whose earliest works were made illegally and on the cheap.
While some cry "sell-out," what of the films themselves? Jia's breakthrough came with Platform and Unknown Pleasures, two patiently observed views of hometown ennui that remain his greatest achievements. Attuning his audience to the passing of each moment, he unravels large swaths of time punctuated with signs of his characters' entrapment: the whistling of a kettle; a pair of lovers quarreling on a wall that encircles their city; a motorcycle that repeatedly breaks down. Following these first successes, The World and Still Life seem to focus and intensify Jia's gifts as a visual stylist, applying them to a broader, more boldly surrealistic canvas even as he reveals a weakness for the metaphorically obvious. The recent fiction/non-fiction hybrid 24 City is a triumph of a different order: a seemingly prosaic talking-heads doc that gives off exhilarating sparks of melodrama, allowing Jia's muse Zhao Tao to match the exquisite expressiveness of Gong Li. [The rest of the post can be read at The L Magazine.]
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