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Unknown Pleasures (2004)
Jia Zhangke
This review is only for people who’ve seen the film. If you haven’t seen
the film, stop reading and please see it now. Unknown Pleasures is a
remarkable film by talented young filmmaker Jia Zhangke. Blah blah
Lincoln Center.
The film contains several open tributes to Wong Kar-Wai as well as
references to Godard and Pulp Fiction, although the actual style has more
in common with Antonioni than it does Tarantino or Wong Kar-Wai. The
long blue shot of the open lot where Bowl Hair and lead female meet at
the bus stop was very similar in composition to the scene in L’Avventura
when the two men are about to fight over a tiny bottle of ink. In that
scene, there’s a long shot over an open courtyard. Here it’s the proverbial
second-world construction pit. In L’Avventura there is the telling detail of
the little horse and cart in the background showing working people going
about their business. Here, it’s a small group of people carrying their
ladder behind a partition in the far background. China.
Jia also possesses Antonioni’s gift of visual framing and reframing as a
scene develops in order to create new feelings/impressions for the viewer.
Take the scene where skinny-face gives his girlfriend the cell phone.
Notice how Jia starts by isolating the two of them against the entirely
sparse and abstract plaster cement wall. Like a dull-tone Rothko, there are
just the right visual elements to create a feeling of muted desolation,
which is, of course, the damn theme of the film. So it’s a café, right? Then
he pans back to let the left side of the room look like a tunnel which goes
somewhere (away from Datong), like a subway station or something.
Then he pans back again and at the same time, we find out both visually
and by the screenplay, it is in fact, a little old run-down bus station/billiard
hall. Wait, isn’t this where we started?
Another of the film’s strengths is the major mega-realism from hepatitis,
to hospitals, to hookers, Coca-Cola, bombs, motorcycle exhaust and puny
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