Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform is a difficult, but ultimately powerful and haunting film. It’s two and a half hours long (the director’s original cut, apparently, went to over three hours). The film follows the members of a performance troupe (musicians, singers, and dancers) in a provincial Chinese town over the period from 1979 to 1990. It’s challenging, and often hard to follow, because the narrative is so elliptical. The style is mostly long takes and static long shots, beautiful in a kind of spare way. It is hard to get intimate with the characters, because they are so often distant from the camera, and dwarfed by their alienating surroundings (towns with crumbling old buildings or ugly new ones; and in between, as they wander from town to town, there are lots of dusty or desert landscapes). Also, characters appear and disappear without much explanation, over the course of the decade that the film follows. Often we get cuts from one situation to another, seemingly continuous because the same music is playing over the cut, and without any explicit indication of how much time has passed — only gradually do we realize that the new scene is months, or even years, after the previous one, and that important events have happened in the interim, which are not shown but only alluded to. The characters’ lives are desultory and ineffectual — nobody really achieves anything or gets anywhere, either personally or professionally. All their relationships fall apart, more from disinterest than acrimoniousness. They never make it to the big cities, which was their goal from the very beginning. Indeed, they are never successful as performers: nobody has much use for their Maoist morality plays in 1979, and nobody has much use for their lame simulations of hard rocking and disco dancing in 1990. The real drama of the film is precisely this change, or rather the social change of which their stylistic changes are an example: China’s movement from Maoist isolation and totalitarian purism to full-fledged capitalism and international connections. At the start of the film, the small town the troupe comes from has crumbling ruins and only a few Party-owned motor vehicles. In the middle, the troupe is privatized — along with just about everything else we see. By the end, there are traffic jams and all sorts of new construction; money is being made, and society has new groups of winners and losers. The film’s subtlety is that these changes are never directly called attention to; it remains in the background (or literally, as the scenic background). The characters remain too mired in their small personal dilemmas to ever explicitly register how much their own lives have changed, together with the world around them. Everything is conveyed by small references: in the opening sequences, for instance, they flub a performance of a train ride to Chairman Mao’s birthplace, because (it turns out) none of them has ever even seen, much less ridden a train. Years later, and halfway through the movie, they are mired in the middle of nowhere when their truck has broken down; they hear a train coming and run wildly toward the tracks, in the hope that it will stop and pick them up — but they make it to the tracks just too late. (It’s a gorgeous scene, because of the hilly scenery, and because of the pop song “Platform” that gives the film its name — apparently it was a big Chinese hit in the 1980s — it is playing on the truck’s radio for the entire scene). We similarly see the characters’ wardrobes change over the course of the film; they stop wearing Maoist uniforms and gradually discover fashions arriving in their small town from the rest of the world. And we move from scenes where Maoist propaganda music is already playing on the town’s public loudspeakers, to ones where people are casually watching Bollywood films on TV in their own homes. And so, for a large portion of the film, I watched the scenes pass, only vaguely being able to parse what was going on; the film’s larger themes and social commentary sneaked up on me, as it were, and only towards the end did I retrospectively realize how brilliant and meaningful was so much of what had come before. All in all, Platform is a rather depressing film; the characters’ lives, as I’ve already said, go nowhere despite the immense social change that is happening within them as well as all around them. And Jia doesn’t see free-wheeling capitalism as much of an improvement over totalitarian Maoism: a few people get rich, but most of them remain downtrodden victims; and the new freedom they have is mostly just the freedom to be a consumer — to the extent that one’s means allow — and to sample the wares from a larger world which thereby penetrates their village, but which otherwise they will never see. This is what happens, Jia suggests, when his country moves from insularity to globalization, and from socialist poverty (both material and spiritual) to capitalist inequality. At the end of the film, I was left with an immense sense of sadness and loss — despite the fact that nothing tragic has happened, and that the film doesn’t accord its characters anything that they could have lost. It’s just a tale of ordinary depression and oppression, in both socialist and capitalist varieties.
Platform
Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform is a difficult, but ultimately powerful and haunting film. It’s two and a half hours long (the director’s original cut, apparently, went to over three hours). The film follows the members of a performance troupe (musicians, singers, and dancers) in a provincial Chinese town over the period from 1979 to 1990. It’s challenging, and often hard to follow, because the narrative is so elliptical. The style is mostly long takes and static long shots, beautiful in a kind of spare way. It is hard to get intimate with the characters, because they are so often distant from the camera, and dwarfed by their alienating surroundings (towns with crumbling old buildings or ugly new ones; and in between, as they wander from town to town, there are lots of dusty or desert landscapes). Also, characters appear and disappear without much explanation, over the course of the decade that the film follows. Often we get cuts from one situation to another, seemingly continuous because the same music is playing over the cut, and without any explicit indication of how much time has passed — only gradually do we realize that the new scene is months, or even years, after the previous one, and that important events have happened in the interim, which are not shown but only alluded to. The characters’ lives are desultory and ineffectual — nobody really achieves anything or gets anywhere, either personally or professionally. All their relationships fall apart, more from disinterest than acrimoniousness. They never make it to the big cities, which was their goal from the very beginning. Indeed, they are never successful as performers: nobody has much use for their Maoist morality plays in 1979, and nobody has much use for their lame simulations of hard rocking and disco dancing in 1990. The real drama of the film is precisely this change, or rather the social change of which their stylistic changes are an example: China’s movement from Maoist isolation and totalitarian purism to full-fledged capitalism and international connections. At the start of the film, the small town the troupe comes from has crumbling ruins and only a few Party-owned motor vehicles. In the middle, the troupe is privatized — along with just about everything else we see. By the end, there are traffic jams and all sorts of new construction; money is being made, and society has new groups of winners and losers. The film’s subtlety is that these changes are never directly called attention to; it remains in the background (or literally, as the scenic background). The characters remain too mired in their small personal dilemmas to ever explicitly register how much their own lives have changed, together with the world around them. Everything is conveyed by small references: in the opening sequences, for instance, they flub a performance of a train ride to Chairman Mao’s birthplace, because (it turns out) none of them has ever even seen, much less ridden a train. Years later, and halfway through the movie, they are mired in the middle of nowhere when their truck has broken down; they hear a train coming and run wildly toward the tracks, in the hope that it will stop and pick them up — but they make it to the tracks just too late. (It’s a gorgeous scene, because of the hilly scenery, and because of the pop song “Platform” that gives the film its name — apparently it was a big Chinese hit in the 1980s — it is playing on the truck’s radio for the entire scene). We similarly see the characters’ wardrobes change over the course of the film; they stop wearing Maoist uniforms and gradually discover fashions arriving in their small town from the rest of the world. And we move from scenes where Maoist propaganda music is already playing on the town’s public loudspeakers, to ones where people are casually watching Bollywood films on TV in their own homes. And so, for a large portion of the film, I watched the scenes pass, only vaguely being able to parse what was going on; the film’s larger themes and social commentary sneaked up on me, as it were, and only towards the end did I retrospectively realize how brilliant and meaningful was so much of what had come before. All in all, Platform is a rather depressing film; the characters’ lives, as I’ve already said, go nowhere despite the immense social change that is happening within them as well as all around them. And Jia doesn’t see free-wheeling capitalism as much of an improvement over totalitarian Maoism: a few people get rich, but most of them remain downtrodden victims; and the new freedom they have is mostly just the freedom to be a consumer — to the extent that one’s means allow — and to sample the wares from a larger world which thereby penetrates their village, but which otherwise they will never see. This is what happens, Jia suggests, when his country moves from insularity to globalization, and from socialist poverty (both material and spiritual) to capitalist inequality. At the end of the film, I was left with an immense sense of sadness and loss — despite the fact that nothing tragic has happened, and that the film doesn’t accord its characters anything that they could have lost. It’s just a tale of ordinary depression and oppression, in both socialist and capitalist varieties.