Two more by Jia Zhangke

On Mubi, I was able to watch two more films by Jia Zhangke: the short comic film The Hedonists (2016) and the feature-length Mountains May Depart (2015).  Both of tells stories against the back drop of  the decline of coal mining: The Hedonists shows three men who've lost their jobs when the coal mine shuts down and who try to find work only to end up as actors in a cultural heritage show. Co-written by Zhao Tao.

Mountains May Depart has three parts in three different time periods: 1999, 2014 and 2025. Zhao Tao is a woman who has two suitors. One is the sympathetic friend who works at the coal mine, the other is an obnoxious  rich guy who owns a gas station, and then buys the failing coal mine so he can fire his rival. She chooses the rich guy and her friend leaves town. The second act shows the coal miner, now with a wife and son, stricken by disease and forced to return home where his wife seeks out Tao and begs for help. Tao is now divorced and has lost custody of her son who lives with this father in Shanghai. When her father dies, she calls her son back for the funeral, and it's clear that she's going to lose him because the father is going to take him to Australia. The last act takes place in 2025, where the son is now a college student who has forgotten his  Chinese and is lost and angry. He starts a relationship with his Chinese teacher, who encourages him to go back to China to try to find his mother. We don't know if he actually does it, but the last scene of the film shows Tao dancing alone in a snowy field with her dog, doing the same dance that opened the film on New Year's Eve 1999. As in his other films, the family drama plays out against the backdrop of major transformations of China--whole industries shutting down, landscapes disappearing as waves of building replace nature or villages with huge cityscapes. The three-act structure will be used again in Ash is the Purest White. Each section is filmed with a different aspect ratio, to communicate something about the feeling of how we viewed film at those times. Some have been critical of the third act (my main complaint is that the actor who plays the young man sometimes mumbles so it is hard to understand his lines) but it has something important to say about the experience of Chinese who have left and whose relationships to language and culture are truncated by dislocation.  Zhao Tao is tremendous as the woman who has to live with the consequences of a choice that deprives her of her child.

Ash is Purest White

Jia Zhangke's film Ash is Purest White (2019) is  apparently a kind of summation of all his previous films. I found his first three films on Criterion, so I'll have to watch them. I'd seen it at the PFA, so seeing it again on the small screen I was so glad I'd seen it in a theater. My first viewing of it was very emotional: the first act is a gangster story with the most arresting and engaging performance by Tao Zhao; the second act shows what happens to her after she gets out of prison where she has spent five years taking the fall for her boyfriend Bin; the last act returns to their home turf and now he is recovering from a stroke and depends on her for survival. Over seventeen years their lives are played out on the backdrop of the enormous changes to China. Her father rails against the abandonment of the mine and the miners. She rids a boat through the Three Gorges where they are told that what they see will soon be under water because of a dam projects. The raggedy workers' housing blocs set in the middle of the fields give way to block after block of high-rises, an enormous train station, a huge arena. As was the case in Bi Gan's film that we just watched, we have the impression that people are like small creatures finding shelter and surviving in a massive coral reef, but here we don't have the close-ups on the corroding walls but a sweep from back-rooms to street plazas, to trains hurtling through the landscape, to a starry sky lit up by mysterious flash that could be a UFO or that could be the forces of change. 

Tao Zhao, the lead actress, is also Jia Zhangke's wife, and has appeared in nine of his films. She was working as a dance teacher when he cast her in the film Platform, and you can see her dancer's  expressivity in her acting. I'm eager to watch the his first three films, available on Criterion, and the two that are on Mubi.