The World (2004)

A theme park in Beijing is the central location of The World, Jia Zhangke's playful and sad story about - well, let's see - loneliness and a sense of placelessness. The theme park contains miniatures of famous symbols for different parts of the world. There's a big ben, an eifel tower, a taj mahal, a st. peter's cathedral. The location is at once cheesy and mesmerizing. The film seems to track relations situated in a globalized world where people long to be somewhere else, with somebody else. Globalization, and the dream of endless possibilities, is contrasted with a feeling of being trapped. The theme park may be too obvious a symbol for dislocalized or disoriented desires, but the film makes all of this work because it induces the place itself, the shabby theme park, with an eerie shabbiness. The theme park represents dreams (dreams about going to France, for example) but is also a very concrete place immersed in gritty working conditions and seedy human drama.

The leading characters are a couple who both work in the theme park. He is a security guard. She is a performer in a voluptuous musical group. The performer's ex comes to visit and the relationship grows increasingly hollow. The security guard tries to help migrants from his home province. The two drift apart from each other, get involved with new people, start to lead new kinds of lives - and start to nurse new dreams and new hopes. We are introduced to the dress-maker whose husband migrate to Europe and a Russian woman who seems to have been forced into prostitution. All this lends the theme park - THE WORLD - where they work with a claustrophobic atmosphere. There they are, surrounded by the world, desiring to be some place else. The world: a surrogate, a cruel joke, a miserable job. A depressing, yet still yearning, simulation.

Jia Zhangke made the very fine and dynamic Still life. He is a bold director who does not seem to fear cinematic leaps: he can go from lush romantic scenes to brutal documentary-style images in a minutes. And these leaps do not feel like cheap effect. He succeeds in telling us multi-layered stories about where we are, about our disconcerting and beautiful world. Zhangke's films - the two that I've seen - are here & now in a way that I find impressing: they are not seeking to hunt for emblematic images for our times as much as they are trying to excavate several ways of interpreting the present. The World is a slow and elusive film - I recommend it!