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8

It's just incredible to me that Jia Zhangke shot this film only 3 weeks after merely having the idea for it. It's so tight, there is an idea in every shot. It captures a certain lack, a void in youth, a certain hopelessness in pop culture - it shares many ideas with Platform but develops them more fully as well as makes them more universal. Its one of the seminal 21st Century films: it keeps us with the people and lets ideas grow out of it rather than the mistakes so many films make when they do the opposite. Shots here run for twice as long as Platform, but they only feel half as long. A beacon of digital cinema,…

1

Cool to see Jia's long takes and docufiction location work run through the experimental freedom of digital video shooting. So even though this is hitting very similar points in its portrait of alienation and ennui under political/economic globalization in China, a scene like that one where Zhao Tao and Qiong Wu (rocking the sick hot wheels flames shirt) are having a whip-pan diner conversation until it smash cuts to the handheld oner of them doing the Pulp Fiction dancing in the discotheque has a youthfully chaotic energy to it that Platform deliberately resisted in its depiction of its disaffected and disillusioned kids wandering their demolished outmoded locale.

14

“i’ll make you soften as fast as instant noodles” 

okay but why did that make ME smile… the bar is so low 

as an american of chinese descent, it’s always interesting to explore the other side of the political narrative. unknown pleasures is jia zhangke’s raw portrayal of the disillusioned youth from china’s counter culture, their lazy understanding of the world and the country’s uncertain future. chronicling repetitive degeneracy at the mercy of western infiltration, the 19 year old antiheroes become defined by american pop culture—perceiving it as escapism rather than a reminder of the reality they can’t obtain. they have wants, desires, a barrel full of aspirations with no ambition to ignite it. 

shot on digital video, jia’s tinted…

16

Subsisting on wavelengths transmitted from a world outside your reach; feeding mind, body and soul with a steady diet of distraction: a thin fluid breakfast and a sparse supper. Slapped in the face and shoved down over and over. There is no fucking future to look forward to… you try to live day to day, but today dreads tomorrow’s arrival and yesterday feels like years ago. Your life appears before you as an image in a grubby, broken mirror, inside which there are shards of solace, much more than the false hopes of the monkey king or an old can of coke. You attempt to cling to these cracks in the glass, as they’re all you have, fleeting though they…

Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ Liked

The process of where historical culture transitions into pop culture, as a narrative film, with characters - or rather human beings, aimlessly wandering in this space between 20th and 21st Century. One of the greatest "youth" films, and maybe the only exemplary "youth" picture of this century so far. If Jia's films appear to be more relevant over time - especially his run between 2002-08, it is, for better or for worse, because the world itself is catching up to China.

1

Unknown Pleasures is Jia Zhangke's most experimental work to date, and in some way his most fundamental one, as it obviously paved the way for the greatness and international success of his following masterpieces. From the gun-dropping club scene in Ash is the Purest White, to the hilariously repetitive slapping antics in A Touch of Sin, Jia's directorial trademarks all trace back to this criminally underrated slow burn, Jia's Dogme-95-ish endeavor that's full of life, soul, and abundant comion for the very land and people he's devoted his whole career to.

Unknown Pleasures, similar to its predecessor Platform, doesn't follow a conventionally concrete plot. Instead it provides snippets of small town existence at the turn of the century, via the…

1

Jia replacing private emotion and personal narrative with the eye of an anthropologist: with both Xiao Wu and Platform being written in 1996, Zhangke had not written a script in five years and the progress - which may have been off-putting or distancing to fans of the previous two works - is clearly evident here. The personal/semi-autobiographical dimensions of the first two films are basically stripped away here, replaced by mere cause-and-effect associations between culture and internal imitation within persons, as they run to an inevitable end-point. Neither the autobiographical attachment and wide scope of ambition of Platform are evident here, and yet I still find myself slightly preferring Unknown Pleasures and its totally mechanical relationships, as these characters progress…

Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½ Liked

“We’re too young. There are choices we can’t make.” 

Loving Jia’s cameos in these early films. Guy Singing on Street is perfect for him. 

When Yuan Yuan escapes the film, she does so on a bicycle, under her own power. Everyone else is subject to the whims of motor vehicles, buses, motorcycles, trains. Even Qiao San is killed by a car. 

Wang Hongwei reprises his role as Xiao Wu, now an older crook, branching into loan sharking. He buys bootleg dvds from Bin Bin (he picks Pulp Fiction), but not before asking if he has any art house movies, including Xiao Wu and Platform (and Love Will Tear Us Apart, another Joy Division reference but also a film directed by…

Review by Paul ★★★½ Liked

Hypnotizing in this tranquility and its ability to show time for people within one area. I appreciated the camera movements, which were very defined and varied. I also liked each character's characterization; they all feel diverse and unique. The second half drags on, and the film’s purposeful aimlessness grows tedious after a while. I’m not left without a few moments I love, though, like the diner scene, TV scenes, and most scenes Zhao Tao is in (She’s fantastic). I hear this and Still Life are the required Caught by The Tides homework, so I’m done on that front. I still might watch a few other Zhangke films before I see it. I’m eager to see if one will really click for me before CBTT.

5

The Criterion Challenge 2025

Aimless, hopeless, futureless. Shackled by disrepair, moulded by worlds unknown to us, worlds far away from us. Connected and disconnected more than any period in history. The gaps between us grow further and wider, all in attempt to bring us closer together. No one was truly prepared for the 21st century, and still 25 years later, no one since has truly made sense of it yet. Any semblance of freedom is superficial at best—we cannot rid ourselves of it all and we cannot grab what we know is out of reach. Catch-up is a losing battle.

5

i'm pretty sure if you waved a geiger counter over my DVD of this film, it would turn up as being extremely radioactive. incredibly cursed evil nightmare ennui energy coming off this, it's great

11

Whatever suffering comes
Whatever weariness comes
I follow the wind
I roam carefree and happy.

Too old to be innocent, too young to be wise. Stuck in a perpetual cycle of aimlessness at the turn of the 21st century, detached from life and blurring the line between fiction and reality in their own heads. An entire generation brought up on false promises and false hopes, only to be slapped in the face by reality.

Listlessly floating about their days in Datong, some of them see Beijing as the place where lives inevitably turn better; where purpose and meaning is to be found. It is akin to paradise. For some, the realisation of not being able to migrate to Beijing is…