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.
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