MUBI

It took Jia 3 weeks to make this feature debut during his last year as a student in the Beijing Film Academy. What’s amazing is that it could be the opus of most other directors’ careers, and compared to Jia’s other films it more than holds its own. The basic elements of the story is similar to the Bresson film, except it’s infused with such a heavy degree of the local culture in a specific time and place through Jia’s eclectic mix of soundtrack and effortless digressions into documentary mode. There’s a lot of hand-held camera work in contrast to the rest of his filmography, and the effect is so spontaneous that I don’t know why he doesn’t use it anymore.

Xiao Wu is a mature exploration of the gritty and downbeat existence of a pickpocket. Never employing cheap melodrama or hasty generalisations, Jia pulls out his sublime narrative skills to force us to reconsider our views on “wrongdoers” who are ostracised by society. Yet he never makes a patronising moral judgments of his lead character, a trap that many many films and tv serials fall into. Rather, he points towards modern life and alienation as sources of distraught and discontent and leaves the rest to us. And because this is cinema and not just ideology (huge fan of the latter in the former though), I must note that the cinematography is fantastic. It refuses to aesthecise any aspect of reality and renders the film seemingly cinema verite. This is Jia’s debut and I hope to see more soon.

Here we see the young Zhang Ke Jia starting to get loose, his first steps. I think he even shot chronologically because the movie itself gets closer to the style that we all know he has. How the individual gets blend or jumps in his surrounding like in Antonioni; but here the question is more political than philosophical: the revolution and how the individual trapped, not even knowing that he is trapped. Or is it more our Easter lenses that makes them look like this? Aesthetically the textures of the regime walls are almost like abstract expressionism. What I like the best about this film is the relationship that starts between Xiao Wu and Mei Mei, is frankly endearing. Not one actor, just common people.