From the outset, Jia established himself as a filmmaker directly facing China's period of transition, foregrounding here the Hong Kong handover to depict a society caught between the twin poles of police-state social control and equally dehumanizing capitalism. Xiao Wu is a pickpocket whose former comrades have all gone straight, making amusing ties between the world of street crime and respectable capitalism. Yet any romanticism that could be applied to the man is lost in his complete social dissociation, leaving him to roam lost around Fenyang and hold one-sided conversations with others where he remains almost entirely silent, unsure what to say and willing to seem rude rather than stupid. The sound design on this is bewilderingly great, resembling the…

"Are you tired of living? Asking to be caught?"

Always cool to see a director come out the gate with their career-long political interests and formal tics already fairly fully-formed. Jia would obviously hone these techniques and his control over them (honestly pretty quickly, Platform was only a few years away) but you've already got the guerilla neorealist docufiction shooting style that incorporates non-actors and the harsh real-life location rubble of a literally crumbling past, the experimental focus on duration and handheld long takes tracking a stripped down minimalist narrative of inertia in this face of this society in purgatory, and of course all the romantic yearning Cantopop that expressively signals a desperation for connection and escape. You've also got…

Pickpocket, Jia Zhangke's full length debut, is ironically the odd one out among Jia's quite luminous filmography. It's clearly a process of forging an identity for Jia, as it resembles more of a traditional, hyper realistic output from the likes of Abbas Kiarostami or Zhang Yimou, rather than Jia's own bizarre, painfully funny Chinese modern vignettes. Nevertheless, Pickpocket still possesses the all too familiar emotional powers and razor sharp insights into the Chinese way of living, and is arguably Jia's most technically immaculate work to date.

Pickpocket is a deeply grounded story with outpouring humanity, which rightfully earned its Kiarostami comparisons. A retired pickpocket juggling his newly developed romance and an uncomfortable reunion with an old friend is an intriguing…

Jia Zhangke's first film is one of his more conventional, but like last year's A Touch of Sin, Jia in genre mode is still more Jia than genre. Sure, the narrative is slow and oblique, but the main character is a recognizable generic type, a young man of questionable morals (he's a pickpocket) alienated in turn from old friends, a romantic interest and family (he also looks like young Woody Allen and acts like young Robert DeNiro). A politically potent depiction of a rapidly changing society, trapped in the contradiction between state terror and laissez-faire capitalism to be sure. But more than that it's about being a self-centered, kind of dumb, young person in caught in a world you never…

Jia Zhangke's debut charts those left behind by encroaching modernism. We follow a pickpocket, doing the only thing he knows how to do and the only thing that has brought him anything. The cinematography is cold and impersonal, a dirty look too with overtones of brown and beige. It's all very washed out and sad, a reflection of our protagonist's state.

Around the edge of the film, we see change. Yet, we see more destruction and loss than we see progress. People are being turfed out of places, having to spend above their means to facilitate the progression of others and generally being left behind by societal drift. At points, we have the technological icons of modernity, frequent cuts to…