Critics reviews

While dramatizing this distance, the elusiveness of the real thing behind the perfect image, the film also suggests a more universal media critique. Dressing up in approximately appropriate ethnic costume in front of the Taj Mahal or a Japanese teahouse, Tao is a projected avatar, albeit one constantly running up against the practical limitations of her simulations—she and an imported Russian coworker share several wrenching scenes together, having no common language except empathy.

He films characters who bear the scars of history even as its truths are so often denied to them, for whom the persistence and suppression of history is one of the fundamental facts of contemporary life in China, and for whom "hallucinatory realism" is a frank depiction of the nightmarish quality of Chinese daily life.

Suggesting at different moments a backstage musical, a failed love story, a surreal comedy, and even a cartoon fantasy, this beautiful, corrosive, visionary masterpiece by Jia Zhang-ke (2004) is a frighteningly persuasive account of the current state of the planet.