24 City (U.)
Directed by Jia Zhangke.
Starring Joan Chen, Tao Zhao, Jianbin Chen, Liping Lu. 109 mins.
Despite the title, the subject of this fascinating docu/ drama hybrid is a factory, a once-secret munitions plant that is about to be demolished and replaced with an apartment block centred around a mall. In its last days Jia Zhangke and his camera move around the derelict structure, and the surrounding streets in Chengdu, talking to people with a connection to the place, trying to give a voice to the ghosts that lurk there.
Everybody's life story, even the dullest person imaginable, holds an inherent fascination. If you took any workplace or social institution in the world and interviewed former workers and people who grew up around it, you would be hard-pressed not to build up a mosaic of regret, struggle and triumph. Here though you have people who have been tossed around on the whims of some of history's darkest wheezes, casually forced to uproot themselves and their families thousands of miles by the diktats of five-year plans and forward leaps, and their tales have a fierce power.
24 City is much more closed in than his other films. There are few exteriors, mostly we see people talking in rooms. It looks like a very artfully shot documentary, but gradually the interviewees are replaced by actors. Four of the nine people we hear are actors, delivering memories scripted by the director and co-writer Yongming Zhai. They are not hard to spot: they are the ones that don't seem like real people. (Plus one of them was the mill owner Josie Packard in Twin Peaks.) Actors are always at their most actorly when they are trying desperately to be real, but I suppose they are used here to deliver composites of all the stories he wanted to tell, plus they represent the notion of family anecdotes becoming folk myth.
It takes some patience to get through a film that is basically a series of static interviews but it is quietly devastating, perhaps the most effective and poignant film in this collection.
Directed by Jia Zhangke.
Starring Joan Chen, Tao Zhao, Jianbin Chen, Liping Lu. 109 mins.
Despite the title, the subject of this fascinating docu/ drama hybrid is a factory, a once-secret munitions plant that is about to be demolished and replaced with an apartment block centred around a mall. In its last days Jia Zhangke and his camera move around the derelict structure, and the surrounding streets in Chengdu, talking to people with a connection to the place, trying to give a voice to the ghosts that lurk there.
Everybody's life story, even the dullest person imaginable, holds an inherent fascination. If you took any workplace or social institution in the world and interviewed former workers and people who grew up around it, you would be hard-pressed not to build up a mosaic of regret, struggle and triumph. Here though you have people who have been tossed around on the whims of some of history's darkest wheezes, casually forced to uproot themselves and their families thousands of miles by the diktats of five-year plans and forward leaps, and their tales have a fierce power.
24 City is much more closed in than his other films. There are few exteriors, mostly we see people talking in rooms. It looks like a very artfully shot documentary, but gradually the interviewees are replaced by actors. Four of the nine people we hear are actors, delivering memories scripted by the director and co-writer Yongming Zhai. They are not hard to spot: they are the ones that don't seem like real people. (Plus one of them was the mill owner Josie Packard in Twin Peaks.) Actors are always at their most actorly when they are trying desperately to be real, but I suppose they are used here to deliver composites of all the stories he wanted to tell, plus they represent the notion of family anecdotes becoming folk myth.
It takes some patience to get through a film that is basically a series of static interviews but it is quietly devastating, perhaps the most effective and poignant film in this collection.
