THE BIG SCREEN
Ash Is Purest White
BY ABBY SUN
Director: Jia Zhangke
Country/Distributor: China/France/Japan, Cohen Media Group
Opening: March 15
TWELVE FEATURES INTO HIS OEUVRE as China’s most essential modern filmmaker, Jia Zhangke continues to remix his own work in Ash Is Purest White, a doomed romance whose protagonist resolutely takes control of her own life. The film opens with documentary footage from 2001, shot soon after Jia got his first video camera and featuring a sleeping young child on a bus as the motion outside the moving vehicle rattles the frame. Even without that background knowledge, it’s an effective bit of placesetting, both reminding us of Jia’s indie documentary chops and signaling his personal connection with the location (near his own birthplace in China’s industrial northwest). Despite its sprawling, two-decade timeline and big budget, Ash Is Purest White is far more than a greatest hits compilation for Jia as he thankfully returns to his strengths after the transcontinental excess of Mountains May Depart.
Jia’s longtime collaborator and wife Zhao Tao stars as Qiao, a dancer who is first introduced without her small-time gangster boyfriend Bin (Liao Fan) in a portent of things to come. Soon, a rival gang encroaches upon this precarious idyll, and the first of the film’s gloriously choreographed sequences proves that Bin is ineffectual without Qiao’s help. Sent to prison after helping Bin, Qiao discovers upon her release that she is alone in the world. The film’s surprising, plot-filled middle third is an acting master class by Zhao, whose mien transfixes through scenes of betrayal, revenge, self-preservation, and petty cons. She winds her way through a tour of China’s rapid development and Westernization, a host of movie-magic coincidences, and a raucous, sprawling public-wedding-feast setpiece that showcases the film’s budget as much as its fight scenes do.
Refusing to adhere to expectations and to irrelevancy, Qiao’s bootstrapping ingenuity could be a modern feminist saga. But Qiao’s rebelliousness is ultimately an ambivalent one—and so is the film’s lifestyle is driven as much by concern for her father’s well-being as her relationship with Bin. When Qiao rescues a woman from a group of predatory men, it’s partly to exact her own revenge; Bin’s new girlfriend sprinkles her dialogue with casual English phrases as a sign of sophistication but also moral corruption; and a gorgeous ferry ride through the Three Gorges region also showcases the dam’s destructive effects. Depicting these contradictions amounts to both a coping mechanism in the face of societal and political forces and a furiously righteous attempt to record what is lost in service of relentless modernization.
