24 City
Factory 420 was in large part a munitions factory, and contemporary China finds itself changing, becoming more and more of an economic presence in the world, and so the factory switched from munitions to jet engines, but still remained inviable.
Beautifully shot, the film’s individual elegies are poignant. And yet, the one thing that detracted from this film for me was the fact that I knew some of it wasn’t real. It’s a “documentary style” drama, which mixes actual accounts and fictional ones performed by actors (occasionally distractingly so, in the case of Joan Chen). Now, with exception to Ms. Chen, I didn’t really know what was real and what wasn’t, and that is perhaps testament to the plain and realistic way Zhang Ke Jia went about this project: little flourishes, stark images of the factory in decline, and letting the stories stand for themselves. But what of the stories? Who is real and who isn’t, and why are they being presented in the same fashion, the same venue? Is there a “dramatic” truth that is attainable only through performance? But what of the realness that pervades most of the film – is it real or constructed? The best answer would be it doesn’t matter, but why play these head games when the real is so good? To what effect is achieved by abutting fiction with experience? Is the intention to decry the naturalness of experience, and prove that fiction is as powerful? Does that make the stories sit second to the narrative agenda?
With Joan Chen’s story, it became unforgivable and disingenuous. Her monologue recalled for me Werner Herzog’s notion of the “ecstatic truth”, but I can’t think of any Herzog film (Dan, help me out) where he so brashly combined the real with fiction, rather he takes the approach of exploding truth to extreme proportions, instead of minimizing fiction to make it seem real. Joan Chen is the one point where he comes close to this “ecstatic” sense of truth, where we have Joan Chen talking about working in the factory and being teased about looking like an actor, “Joan Chen”, in the film Xiao Xua, and how this resemblance followed her throughout her career at the factory. At this point, we have to ask a number of questions: 1) is this entirely made up or is 2) Joan Chen playing a Joan Chen look alike? If 2), why is Joan Chen playing her? If 1) how does this serve the story apart from layering fictions upon fictions and distracting us from actual stories that have the benefit of having happened? In the other Zhang Ke Jia film I’ve seen Unknown Pleasures, he employs this kind of meta-game as well, when the principle actors, running from the law, ask a bootlegger if they have any Zhang Ke Jia films. Fine, in that film, it’s a joke (that suggests a stern control of cultural artifacts – yes, indeed, the bootlegger has no Zhang Ke Jia films), but here does it tell us anything at all about what these people are going through?
Zhang Ke Jia’s style is admirable (the bike going up the hill scene makes Unknown Pleasures worth watching alone) – it is among the most deliberate and patience styles I’ve seen in any modern filmmaker. Much of his film is about the portraiture of presentation, and how self-awareness and acceptance grow out of unchangeable forces. One question the film fails to answer but reflects largely on the cultural changes modern China is undergoing is that the closure of this factory is decimating this area. People are losing their jobs and having to scale back, move out and find new work. If everyone is gone, who will live in the luxury condominiums? Joan Chen, perhaps.
