Pickpocket

English title had given (Bresson's treasure) this prominent Jia Zhangke's iconic Chinese rural magical realism masterpiece a kind of tone of obsessional Heimlich in our hero Wang Hongwei, who graduated from the same film school as Jia Zhangke, but credited as a "non-professional actor", it's weird, but pretty rarefied.

I don't know how Jia Zhangke created the perfect grotesque atmosphere between the two estranged or intimate conversations. His bravura handle of trims of pickpocketing details, with the remaining of Xiao Wu's personal life is brilliant.

He is a bad, quotidian-stolen pickpocket, but he never lost his soul as a generous, wholehearted Valentine and a brother.

The shaking camera is aptly combined with the realistic setting and crew. The performance is divine, especially Wang Hongwei, he looks fun and mysterious, charismatic.

The blackout of the romantic scene is a bravura technique. Wang Hongwei ascends.

The sound mixing is garbage, with a substantial amount of noise. The dialect cannot be understood. The camera is shaky. The performance is pretty amateurish. The pace is slow. All in all, this film is an unwatchable mess.

Xiao Wu is to me an incredible lively film.It's like the viewer is totally a part of the scenes he is seeing.the director is a genius in giving you the real-life sense.The raw way of the photography gives you an honest picture of a certain time in China's history... we follow a petty thief Xiau Wu in his 'struggle 'to survive.... everyone around him , his mates from the scenes have all sworn off their criminal pasts and are on the road to be normal citizens...not Xia Wu however.He seems not to be able to break with his 'old'life. What this film shows us in an incredible way to is a piece of Recent Chinese history...the emerging of private enterprise...filmed in the mid 90-ies we as viewers are made very much part of these developments. an excellent and very capturing film in every way ! great job done by the all amateur actors cast.Zhang Ke Jia did an unique job here !

This no budget film is shot with a hand held camera. It shows, but this does not affect the quality of the film. The director has made an intense movie about, Chinese street life. However the culture in China is very different from the west, we can see that the problems of little Wu are universal.

A 20-something in rural China who makes his small time living being a pickpocket faces two changes which pressure his life: a very public crackdown on crime, and a childhood friend having moved on to a respectable life, soon to be married, but not inviting him to the wedding. China itself seems to be changing, with signs of construction and modernization everywhere, but the main character, Xiao Wu (Wang Hongwei) is not progressing along with it, stubbornly sticking to his ways, despite the warnings from others.

There is a sense of forlorn emptiness here, as Xiao Wu starts falling for a karaoke girl, desperately seeking more meaning out of their relationship than she is. He returns home to his family, who are peasant farmers, and finds that his brothers are also moving on in life, and his father is angry to the point of casting him out. There are glimmers of him wanting to be a good person, like when he gives his mother a ring, or when he anonymously returns ID cards from the wallets he's stolen because they're hard for the owners to replace, but he continues stealing and seems hopelessly non-aspirational, thus making him a tough character to like.

Gandhi once said that "the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members," and while you could argue that Xiao Wu himself has preyed on the vulnerable, when he's publicly chastised on TV and later handcuffed to a post and surrounded by people gawking at him, the feeling of vulnerability is intense. We get the conflicting sense of it being just for him to punished, but at the same time, pity for him arriving at this place in life, and what his prospects might be. Therein lies the power of the film, and I certainly admired it.

The reason for not giving the film a higher rating was just a lack of personal enjoyment for what was a dreary story, centered exclusively on the main character, who was stuck in one gear. I would have loved a contrast in the development of his friend's or family's characters, those getting on in the world as best they can. Certainly a solid debut film from Jia Zhangke though.