Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000)
The film opens with a performance of the Peasant Culture Group given to a dully lit, crowded theatre. The members of this troupe will be our main characters, as we head with them through the changes wrought by the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping. Eventually, with commercialisation and Western pop-cultural influence, we see them as The All Star Rock 'n' Breakdance Electronic Band. You get the picture. We follow the characters through this new, changing landscape, not as the standard characters experiencing and commenting on the significance of change or transition, but as characters just trying to live.
This was a demanding film to watch. Not only because I had constant family-based interruptions, but because I have never seen a film that deals with its material quite in this way. Jia dictates that you pay careful attention, with his long takes, gorgeous, complicated compositions, and switches between the main protagonists in the troupe with very little traditional exposition. His skill and his intellect quickly becomes evident, however, with the choreography of the characters within the mis en scene, the camera and colours all cohering brilliantly. I loved the use of the reds, blasting out at you from the muted greys and blues of the populace and buildings. It's also pretty hilarious at times, with the group leader, Song, giving and copping a heap of grief through the film, and the dance routines or punkish performances really making me chuckle.
The crux of the film, in my mind, is its form. This is an epic dealing with so many things: transition (the troupe becomes privately owned 1/3 through the film), stagnation (the film and the characters always seems to loop back to the walls of the same provincial city) and struggle to transcend, to live anew, when everything is set to drag you back to the status quo. It's as if the characters are lost in a fog, a dream of renewal, of change, perhaps, that seems tantalisingly close in their little city, but peters out - as the final shot so starkly depicts - lost in the morass. Jia foregos the usual staples of the epic: overt conflict and melodramatics, strongly relatable heroes, for a much clearer intellectualisation of the process of lives lived in the emerging new China. If you can get past the radical form, the rewards are many.
I wrote down that it was a sort of collectivist, intimate epic. The grand sweep of history becomes localised into little meetings discussing how much members are willing to put up to become part of the new privately-owned collective. Where female agency is constantly suppressed, by family, by lovers, by the state. And where commercialisation just sort of creeps up and robs the characters blind. Jia eyes are wide open, refusing to romanticise the collectivist past, but also squaring up to the new capitalism with a critical eye.
Whatever it is, and whether I'm even making any coherent sense, it was a spectacularly great film.