Few directors have devoted their work to the human ravages of their country’s economic growth. Of course, few countries have grown as fast and furiously as China. In that respect, Jia Zhangke has been in the right place at the right time. But the films he’s made in this decade - among them, “Unknown Pleasures,’’ “Platform,’’ “The World,’’ “Still Life,’’ and the ultimately moving “24 City,’’ which opens today at the Museum of Fine Arts - are more than the byproduct of happenstance. Together, they create a surreal national chronicle, artistic in nature, political by temperament, tactile, dolorous, ironically funny, grounded in a hypnotic haze of smoke, fumes, fog, and waste.
24 City
Sweet and sentimental stories of displacement
While “Still Life’’ focused on the displacements stirred during the ongoing construction of the Three Gorges dam, “24 City’’ settles on an aeronautics factory in Chengdu, a city whose expansion seems to epitomize the rest of the country’s. The company that has run the factory since the 1940s is moving to a new location. The old building is to be demolished and the site turned, somewhat inevitably, into a building of condos called 24 City.
Other industrial towns all over the world could tell the same story, and many filmmakers have: a flourishing, then a demise. Jia has done so with poetry. He tells factory 420’s story through the memories of the men and women who hold some connection to it (either because they worked there or their parents did).
“24 City’’ is as vivid as his other movies; as ambiguous, too. Built largely out of interviews, the movie leaves vague who is and isn’t acting. Or, it leaves that issue as vague as it can. The real people have a sadness and charisma that feels more organic than the professionals. The first former worker Jia introduces, He Xikun, reminisces about a former boss, Wang Zhiren, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. Jia films the reunion: two old men catching up, the older one explaining that he toiled at 420 every day (including holidays) for decades. Presumably, that explains why He has to shout for Wang to hear him. Their visit is touching. As the younger man strokes the head of the wizened, wheezing older one, you sense that the factory had taken its toll years ago.
It’s tough for the actors who follow to approximate this emotional matter-of-factness. They’re a mix of polish and preciousness. We meet a performer who worked as a quality inspector at 420. Having gotten her name, Little Flower, from a soapy old Joan Chen movie, she conducts her interview sitting in the chair of a beauty salon.
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