ASHES OF TIME, RIVERS OF RETURN Jia Zhang-Ke’s Ash Is Purest White

Jia Zhang-Ke has been busy. In the year since his last feature, Mountains May Depart (2015), he has produced several films through his company, Xstream Pictures; contributed a segment to the omnibus film Where Has the Time Gone? (2017); played a key role in inaugurating the Pingyao International Film Festival; and also knocked out a standalone short, The Hedonists (2016). And, while it wouldn’t be unreasonable to fear that Jia seems to be spreading himself mightily thin, fans need not worry. Returning with Ash Is Purest White (2018), the writer/director is firing on all cylinders, his focus as refined as ever. Jia’s is a body of work marked by subtle inflections and modulations as he returns to the same set of concerns from film to film. His characters have often hovered on the peripheries of criminality, but Ash plunders gleefully and wholeheartedly from the gangster film without losing sight of its maker’s trademark concern for his rapidly transforming homeland.

At the centre of the film once again is Zhao Tao, a mainstay of Jia’s film world since Platform (2000). Zhao’s roles for Jia tend to act as audience surrogates, bearing witness to social and historical change. The narrative function of her character is effectively no different in Ash, but she brings a new gravitas to this particular role, as she and Jia collectively