24 City

I finally watched this film from beginning to end, after seeing pieces of it from various TV channels.

First of all, I want to remind viewers that the loss of employment due to the closure of a factory or business, and the resulting hardship for the affected, is a global problem and not unique to China. Economic vicissitudes are simply a fact life, and no country can be an exception to this rule. So any suggestion that Director Jia intended to hide the magnitude of the impact to the laid off employees of the closed down factory is a mute point.

As with his other works, this film requires the utmost in patience. Long takes of interviewees, played by the actual characters themselves or substituted by professional actors, convey the fineness in human emotion of the affected characters.

The film is about lives of very ordinary Chinese people in an evolving economy. Some young, some middle-aged, and some old. It explores human emotion - mostly the good side of it. It was about love neglected over time, or over mundane day-to-day obligations. The beautiful factory worker role played by Joan Chen is an interesting one - she was the prettiest of the bunch and yet a failure in finding love. Great acting from Ms. Chen for this short role.

In short, I enjoyed the film as I did with 'Still Life'. So when you are in the mood for some serious cinema or have the interest for a glimpse into life in contemporary China, get this DVD and let Jia Zhang Ke tell you the stories of these ex-factory workers. Your patience will be rewarded.

Zhang Ke Jia's 24 City has an unusually oblique narrative, mostly told through a series of interviews that initially seem to have little connection to one another. As the film goes on, narrative threads begin to come together into a coherent whole. This narrative strategy is initially off putting but eventually yields dividends for the patient viewer.

The narrative has some interesting things to say about Chinese culture, which Zhang depicts as quite rigid with little mobility economically or geographically for most people. At the same time, people's situations aren't particularly stable as several workers talk about suddenly losing their jobs through no fault of their own. In spite of a lack of external motivation, citizens are expected to be very internally motivated and express this through patriotic team fervor and self-sacrifice.

In spite of how inherently un-cinematic the interviews (which make up the majority of this film) are, Zhang is able to bring his mastery of the medium to bear and 24 City ultimately transcends this limitation. One way he does this is to surround each interview segment with scenes full of action, such as numerous factory sequences and one memorable early shot taken from a moving truck. He also makes the interviews themselves visually interesting in a couple of way. First, most of the interviews incorporate some sort of background movement, including one that has two men playing badminton and another that offers frequent glimpses of foot traffic. Secondly, each interview takes place in a carefully designed space that tends to be both full of detail and reflective of the unique characteristics of the interviewee. Finally, he uses camera movements quite carefully for emphasis throughout. Ultimately, 24 City is an example of how carefully employed cinematic techniques can make even material which initially seems quite humdrum and unsuited for film into a memorably viewing experience.

This review is primarily in response to Barry Freed's, whose take on the film is so wildly different from mine it makes me wonder if we saw the same movie.

I LOVED this movie. I think the quasi-documentary style is wholly winning and adds a lot to the story. As far as defending Jia's decision not to do a "traditional" documentary, I guess I just have to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he had wanted to do a "traditional" documentary, then he would have done so. I feel that Jia is an accomplished enough artist that I can assume he has an instinctive sense of what will best serve a particular story. Clearly, in this instance, he decided on a fact/fiction "blend", and to my mind, he made the right call.

While watching this, I couldn't help but think of Werner Herzog and his theory of "ecstatic truth" ("I know that by making a clear distinction between "fact" and "truth" in my films, I'm able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct." - W. Herzog). While I'm not (necessarily) making a comparison between Zhang-ke and Herzog, I feel that they are very much after the same thing. Whether an essential truth can be best conveyed using actors or non-actors, using a documentary or drama approach, etc. are questions that both directors obviously struggle with, and I feel that they have come to similar conclusions. They (to my mind) have opted to fuse the two approaches, in an attempt to remove intellectual and emotional barriers between the people on-screen and the people in the audience. And more often than not, that approach works, and works in a very powerful way.

Finally, I thought the performances, without exception, were utterly devastating and mind-blowing. I don't know what Jia does to his actors to get performances of that caliber, but whatever it is, he needs to keep it up. I think this is an excellent companion-piece to "Still Life", and a beautiful addition to his body of work. Masterful.

Not many Chinese films obtain a release in Western cinemas. Those that do tend to be set in the distant past and have large casts, colourful costumes and exciting action - think "Hero", "House Of Flying Daggers", "Curse Of The Golden Flower" and "Red Cliff". This is not one of those movies. "24 City" is contemporary in subject, pedestrian in pacing, and documentary in style (director Jia Zhang-ke uses a mix of real characters and actors including Joan Chen).

It is set in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, which I visited a few weeks before seeing the film and I took along two friends from Sichuan who know the city well. It tells the terribly sad tale of the closure of a factory, which once employed 4,000 workers on the manufacture of military hardware, so that the site can be used for a modern complex of apartments and hotels - the 24 City of the title.

The unusual part documentary/part fiction style - there are five authentic interviews and four fictional scenes delivered by actors - means that the work lacks the 'bite' of a real documentary and the narrative of full fiction, but the critics liked it.

That DVD design looked as if it was about a japan military story, because their military flag looks similar.

This film is like an authentic documentary. The few famous actors appeared in it did a good job. Even though you know who they are in real life, but they acted as if they were really part of that factory.

And I loved it when Joan chen spoke shanghai dialect, it is rare for a Chinese film to use shanghai dialect. It is sort of forbidden by the Chinese communist party. If hong kong was a part of China since 1949, then there won't be any cantonese films at all, because the CCP forces every film to be made in mandarin Chinese only.

I also liked it when Joan chen spoke her mandarin with a shanghai accent. she can speak perfect mandarin, but she did it to make her role more authentic.

Time is changing, I believe what those people said in this film really reflect what is happening to those factory workers who were laid off.