Cannes. 24 City.

"The latest chapter in Jia Zhangke's chronicles of modern Chinese history is certain to reinforce the director's status as an international arthouse icon," writes Dan Fainaru, reviewing 24 City for Screen Daily.

"Consisting of five authentic interviews and four fictional monologues delivered by actors (but presented in a documentary format) it uses the removal of a large industrial complex from the centre of Chengdu, to be replaced by flashy new high-rise luxury apartments (24 City), as the departure point for an account of rapid-pace changes in China over the last half-century."

"Following Still Life and Useless, documentary and fictional artifice are combined ever more egregiously by Mainland helmer Jia Zhangke in 24 City," writes Variety's Derek Elley. "Result is far more accessible than Jia's previous two pictures, with moments of genuine emotion by the real-life interviewees. But technique of interweaving name actors into the docu fabric smacks of auteurism for the sake of it, and pic says nothing new or revealing that hasn't been said in countless other movies and docus."

Competing.

Update: "'As far as I'm concerned,' Jia says in a program note, 'history is always a blend of facts and imagination.'" Mary Corliss for Time: "24 City is eloquent testimony to a China that is vanishing with each swing of the wrecking ball. But the memories of the workers in their factory microcosm, and telling documentaries like these, keep the past alive, so that later generations will know what once was, and what's been lost."

Updates, 5/18: "Jia may have absorbed the aesthetics of Wang Bing's West of the Tracks and Feng Ming in his meditative interpretation of Chinese social history," writes Maggie Lee in the Hollywood Reporter. "Less ambitious than Wang, the film neither strains for unplumbed depths nor all-encompassing breadth. It is essentially a micro-vision of individuals of various ages, offering recollections or opinions either of their parents or their own that are related to the factory's past that deliberately sound improvised. Grander themes like historical turmoil, seismic shifts in economic and human infrastructures are in the periphery, but always informing these characters' destinies."

"Jia's poetic vision of demolition and progress takes on disturbing new resonances after the recent earthquake that killed thousands of people in the same area where the film takes place," notes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "One has to wonder whether 24 City, the high-rise luxury apartment complex that has replaced Factory 420, is still standing.... The film takes an ironic turn with the story of 'Little Flower,' a middle-aged former factory worker (played by actress Joan Chen) who received her nickname because she looked like Joan Chen in a famous 70s movie called Little Flower. While Chen's performance is memorable, the film's most affecting moments belong to the real-life older citizens, men and women who devoted their lives to work, now made unnecessary and obsolete."

Updates, 5/19: "Without nostalgia but with sensitivity and depth of feeling, Mr Jia is documenting a country and several generations that are disappearing before the world's eyes," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[I]n 24 City you can see China repurposing what come across as very American ideas about the pursuit of happiness, success and especially money. Mr Jia is one of the most original filmmakers working today, creating movies about a country that seems like a sequel."

"Not only is the 38-year-old director the most prominent Chinese filmmaker of his generation, he also has come to assume the role of witness and conscience in a society characterized by rapid modernization and a growing amnesia." Dennis Lim talks with Jia for the Los Angeles Times.

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco will be screening Useless and Dong on June 5 and 8.

Updates, 5/21: "More obviously documentary than most of his fiction films (or vice versa), Jia's 24 City is an ambivalent exercise in Communist nostalgia so meaningfully framed that it could have been shot by Andy Warhol or Chantal Akerman," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "As with Jia's other movies, this subversively old-fashioned hymn to production is filled with offbeat details (an elderly worker walking past the doomed plant holding her bag of IV fluid aloft like a torch of freedom) and punctuated with pop songs."

"As befits a filmmaker who always looked for the documentary and the fictive in his works, Jia is moving towards a place where the mature result may be an indistinguishable hybrid," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Like Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini before him - to name but a few - Jia embraces both impulses instantly, and like those before him, this hybrid of the times is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Its method strange and its deeper motivations opaque, the sense is of a work in progress, an experiment towards a naturally hybrid cinema of modern China."

Update, 5/27: Edwin Mak translates two Chinese articles on Jia and his new film. Via Girish.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 17, 2008 12:56 PM