Ash Is Purest White
It speaks to the richness of Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre that Ash Is Purest White already feels like a career summation, even though the Chinese director has yet to turn 50. Transition has always been at the heart of Jia’s work, but this, his twelfth feature-length film, explores the theme across three carefully intertwined levels, gently tracing out the progress of a relationship, a country, and his own development as a filmmaker to arrive at what feels like a definitive statement on each of them: nothing changes, nothing stays the same.
The film’s central relationship is between Qiao (Zhao Tao) and her small-time gangster boyfriend Bi (Liao Fan), its dynamic already largely apparent from how the couple dance in a gaudy Datong nightclub in 2001 near the film’s beginning. After rompingand then disgruntled, even stopping the dance for a moment as a means of reproach. Yet with the music still pounding, it’s as if she’s incapable of staying angry with him for long, as she soon begins to gyrate again with even greater intensity, his misdemeanour already forgotten or taken as par for the course.
