Shijie

Though this movie is to some extent, demanding on the audience, a little patience and decent memory will leave you spellbound after the movie. I do warn that if you don't have the patience for books such as The Idiot, don't watch it. Otherwise, I'm sure it will be enjoyable. Jiangke takes the candor of Yasujiro Ozu's dramas and removes kindness, whimsicality, and love and replaces these with loneliness, harshness, and austerity. Powerful combination. The lead actress acts in a way that seems to forget that it's being filmed for a movie. The level of focus on her part is astounding to me. This is in fact true for the entire cast. The irony of the movie lies in its title: The World - a word that conveys a sense of endless possibility. What you get is quite the opposite - in fact the characters seem to be confined by such a level of endless impossibility that the throughout the film, I found myself fearing an imminent gunfight. That never came but the end is equally, if not, more shocking.