"24 City"

By David Hudson on 06/04/2009

[Updated through 6/6]

"Babies dead from melamine in their milk, Rem Koolhaas's Beijing hotel up in flames, earthquake victims protesting lax construction standards, workers rioting as the tiger economy tanks," begins James Quandt in a piece for Artforum that almost seems as if it were written specifically for this day: "Chinese officials may have pulled off the vast, falsifying spectacle of last year's Olympics, but the corruption and sheer haplessness of their regime now leaves the country uneasy and teetering. Jia Zhangke, chronicler and bard of the new China with his densely poetic films about the dislocation and anxiety caused by Deng Xiaoping's market 'reforms,' had already captured the arrogating power of spectacle in a country intent on erecting a pristine facsimile of late civilization over the drowned villages, polluted skies, and broken hopes of its populace.... '24 City' eloquently extends the central concerns of Jia's cinema - the obsolescent lives, throwaway traditions, broken or vanished ideals mourned in a dancehall song in his short film 'In Public' (2001): 'The laborious and courageous Chinese people, marching with vigor into a new age.'"

"On the one hand," writes J Hoberman in the Voice, "'24 City' seems an ambivalent, aestheticizing exercise in Communist nostalgia - Jia's images are so deliberately framed, they might have come from an Andy Warhol screen test or Chantal Akerman video installation. On the other hand, this subversively old-fashioned hymn to industrial production is filled with offbeat, vaguely absurd details.... Released a few months back in China, '24 City' has proven to be Jia's most commercially successful film. But despite his deliberate mise-en-scène and the hyper-clarity of the high-definition images, it's not an easy movie to read."

"Jia Zhangke's recent work hasn't exactly been the cheeriest of oeuvres," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door, "but '24 City' has the stench of death hanging over it more than anything he's yet attempted. Ostensibly a portrait via interviews of the closing of a military factory complex to make way for a luxury condo (a ready-made metaphor for China's capitalist changeover that Jia doesn't have to nudge too hard at), this is yet another one of Jia's inscrutable little exercises in melding the staged and the vérité."

"Jia alternates between languorous shots of the factory in its final days and extended talking-head interviews with former workers and their families, though it's never acknowledged in the movie proper that three of these accounts are invented monologues performed by actresses." Keith Uhlich for Time Out New York: "It's likely that a Chinese audience will be immediately hip to the film's aesthetic, which calls to mind Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's similar experiments with the medium, especially his school-system 'documentaries' 'First Graders' and 'Homework.' For Westerners, '24 City' is more likely to play as a frequently frustrating and oblique experience, though that's not meant as dissuasion."

"In what sounds like a bolder experiment than it turns out to be," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club, "'24 City' confuses the line between fiction and documentary, framing the factory closing around interviews with eight subjects - five workers sharing their real-life experiences, and three professional actresses (Joan Chen, Lv Liping and Zhao Tao) telling other women's stories as if they were their own. The difference between the two parties is jarring without necessarily being illuminating: There isn't much continuity between the real people and the actors, and Jia's intended purpose, to represent history as 'a blend of facts and imagination,' is only made clear through his official statement. Mostly, '24 City' falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis."

"[A]s much as '24 City' is about history, it's also about an uneasy nostalgia for China's industrial past; having Chen - once known as 'the Elizabeth Taylor of China' - play a gem-sweatered woman who regales her 'interviewer' with tales about her legendary status at the factory only enriches this sense of lost time," writes IFC guest critic Melissa Anderson.

At the IFC Center from tomorrow through Tuesday.

Earlier: Reviews from last year's New York Film Festival.

Updates, 6/5: "Given his rarefied style, it was instructive to read in a recent New Yorker profile that Mr Jia has been criticized by some Chinese intellectuals for 'abandoning his most subversive themes,'" writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "This criticism might be due to the fact that Mr Jia, who once flew under the government's radar, now shoots his movies with its official approval. Or that the state-owned company that redeveloped the factory also helped pay for '24 City.' Whatever the case, Mr Jia doesn't seem to have sold out for the state's blessing, at least as far as this Westerner can tell.... There's something slightly disorienting about a work that doesn't have the usual markers that assure you that now you're watching a fiction, now you're watching a documentary, which, as I realized on second viewing, can work beautifully for a movie about profound dislocation.

"Jia keeps a cryptic distance, observing, but avoiding easy judgments or pat conclusions, and mistrusting narratives or images that lead to destinations too emotionally cathartic or clarifying; altogether an elegant way to remind us how complex and dynamic a subject he is taking on," wrote David Coursen in the Parallax View back in April; and, as noted, in the comment below (thanks!), Shelly Kraicer places "24 City" within the context of China's evolving relationship with its own past.

Update, 6/6: "Jia is nothing if not a visual artist and, for all the importance of the words spoken in the interview segments, it's through its images that '24 City' makes its impact most deeply felt," writes Andrew Schenker. "Along with longtime DP Yu Lik-wai and Wang Yu, the director crafts a sharp high-def palette, equally suited to capturing the dull grays of the cavernous factory remains and the livid orange of a molten rod heated within its crumbling walls. Jia fills out his film with long, static takes of workers posing or masses of buildings standing on their last legs, giving the viewer ample time to contemplate the drawn faces of the dispossessed or the block-like structures about to tumble to the ground."

"For spectators who've followed Jia's work since 'Xiao Wu,' '24 City' risks seeming overly familiar," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "His determination to crank out a film almost every year speaks to a desire to match his country's dizzying rate of change. Up to this point, Jia dealt better with the reality of Chinese life through the filter of fiction. '24 City' offers an innovative blend of narrative and documentary that raises the question of which form can better treat the complex dilemmas facing the workers at Factory 420. It suggests that fiction becomes impossible to separate from fact as people recall history.... With a few changes, the film could be remade in Cleveland or Detroit with Halle Berry or Julia Roberts playing Little Flower."

[Photo: "24 City," Cinema Guild, 2008]

Tags: Chinese Cinema, Jia Zhangke, Joan Chen