The World
The title of Jia Zhang-ke’s 2004 masterpiece, The World–a film that’s hilarious and upsetting, epic and dystopian–is an ironic pun and a metaphor. It’s also the name of the real theme park outside Beijing where most of the action is set and practically all its characters work. “See the world without ever leaving Beijing” is one slogan for the 115-acre park, where a monorail circles scaled-down replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, London Bridge, Saint Mark’s Square, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Pyramids, and even a Lower Manhattan complete with the Twin Towers. Extravagant kitsch like this may offer momentary escape from the everyday, but Jia is interested in showing the everyday activities needed to hold this kitsch in place as well as the alienation in this displaced world–and therefore in the world in general, including the one we know.
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Jia, with his choreographed wide-screen long takes in long shot, may be the best cinematic composer of figures in landscapes since Michelangelo Antonioni. And as with Antonioni, the disconnections count more than the connections. The only two people in The World who get married bicker constantly, mainly about his paranoia regarding her mobile phone; when he wants to convey his despair he calmly sets his jacket on fire.
Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) also shows a modern urban society lost in space, where the reflections of familiar Paris monuments like the Eiffel Tower on the glass doors of anonymous skyscrapers offers a kind of inverted version of Jia’s park and its displacements. Tati found a utopian solution to his characters’ alienation that bypassed intimacy and depended on creative and festive uses of shared public spaces. But that was before mobile phones and the Internet replaced public spaces with virtual private spaces. This film has its share of partying and celebrations, and we even see workers in a sweatshop outside the park dancing during a break. But their low-tech factory specializes in reproducing chic fashions from Europe, suggesting simulacra related to those of the theme park.
When: Fri 7/29 through Thu 8/4
