It's just incredible to me that Jia Zhangke shot this film only 3 weeks after merely having the idea for it. It's so tight, there is an idea in every shot. It captures a certain lack, a void in youth, a certain hopelessness in pop culture - it shares many ideas with Platform but develops them more fully as well as makes them more universal. Its one of the seminal 21st Century films: it keeps us with the people and lets ideas grow out of it rather than the mistakes so many films make when they do the opposite. Shots here run for twice as long as Platform, but they only feel half as long. A beacon of digital cinema,…

“i’ll make you soften as fast as instant noodles” 

okay but why did that make ME smile… the bar is so low 

as an american of chinese descent, it’s always interesting to explore the other side of the political narrative. unknown pleasures is jia zhangke’s raw portrayal of the disillusioned youth from china’s counter culture, their lazy understanding of the world and the country’s uncertain future. chronicling repetitive degeneracy at the mercy of western infiltration, the 19 year old antiheroes become defined by american pop culture—perceiving it as escapism rather than a reminder of the reality they can’t obtain. they have wants, desires, a barrel full of aspirations with no ambition to ignite it. 

shot on digital video, jia’s tinted…

Subsisting on wavelengths transmitted from a world outside your reach; feeding mind, body and soul with a steady diet of distraction: a thin fluid breakfast and a sparse supper. Slapped in the face and shoved down over and over. There is no fucking future to look forward to… you try to live day to day, but today dreads tomorrow’s arrival and yesterday feels like years ago. Your life appears before you as an image in a grubby, broken mirror, inside which there are shards of solace, much more than the false hopes of the monkey king or an old can of coke. You attempt to cling to these cracks in the glass, as they’re all you have, fleeting though they…

Unknown Pleasures is Jia Zhangke's most experimental work to date, and in some way his most fundamental one, as it obviously paved the way for the greatness and international success of his following masterpieces. From the gun-dropping club scene in Ash is the Purest White, to the hilariously repetitive slapping antics in A Touch of Sin, Jia's directorial trademarks all trace back to this criminally underrated slow burn, Jia's Dogme-95-ish endeavor that's full of life, soul, and abundant compassion for the very land and people he's devoted his whole career to.

Unknown Pleasures, similar to its predecessor Platform, doesn't follow a conventionally concrete plot. Instead it provides snippets of small town existence at the turn of the century, via the…

Jia replacing private emotion and personal narrative with the eye of an anthropologist: with both Xiao Wu and Platform being written in 1996, Zhangke had not written a script in five years and the progress - which may have been off-putting or distancing to fans of the previous two works - is clearly evident here. The personal/semi-autobiographical dimensions of the first two films are basically stripped away here, replaced by mere cause-and-effect associations between culture and internal imitation within persons, as they run to an inevitable end-point. Neither the autobiographical attachment and wide scope of ambition of Platform are evident here, and yet I still find myself slightly preferring Unknown Pleasures and its totally mechanical relationships, as these characters progress…

“We’re too young. There are choices we can’t make.” 

Loving Jia’s cameos in these early films. Guy Singing on Street is perfect for him. 

When Yuan Yuan escapes the film, she does so on a bicycle, under her own power. Everyone else is subject to the whims of motor vehicles, buses, motorcycles, trains. Even Qiao San is killed by a car. 

Wang Hongwei reprises his role as Xiao Wu, now an older crook, branching into loan sharking. He buys bootleg dvds from Bin Bin (he picks Pulp Fiction), but not before asking if he has any art house movies, including Xiao Wu and Platform (and Love Will Tear Us Apart, another Joy Division reference but also a film directed by…

Whatever suffering comes
Whatever weariness comes
I follow the wind
I roam carefree and happy.

Too old to be innocent, too young to be wise. Stuck in a perpetual cycle of aimlessness at the turn of the 21st century, detached from life and blurring the line between fiction and reality in their own heads. An entire generation brought up on false promises and false hopes, only to be slapped in the face by reality.

Listlessly floating about their days in Datong, some of them see Beijing as the place where lives inevitably turn better; where purpose and meaning is to be found. It is akin to paradise. For some, the realisation of not being able to migrate to Beijing is…