China Daily Global Edition (USA)
LATEST FILM IS PUREST JIA
With complex characters and a small-town setting, Jia Zhangke’s new gangland flick, Ash Is Purest White, is an epic, nostalgic tale told over nearly two decades. Xu Fan reports.
Over the past 16 years, Jia Zhangke has seen five of his directorial movies nominated for the Palme d’Or, one of the movie world’s most prestigious awards.
Again, his latest effort, Ash Is Purest White, was nominated for the honor at the recently held 71st Cannes Film Festival, as well as being selected to compete in a further six categories: best actress, best actor, best director, best screenplay, the Jury Prize and the Grand Prix.
However, while Jia’s film failed to topple Japanese rival Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters for the top prize, the 48-year-old auteur is optimistic about the future.
Recently, Jia, alongside his wife and lead actress Zhao Tao, as well as actor Liao Fan, presented at a Beijing event to announce the Chinawide opening of Ash Is Purest White on Sept 21.
While considering his past achievements — especially at the Venice International Film Festival — Jia remains pragmatic about the Cannes defeat. “It’s fair to lose something when you have gained another. I told my team, teasingly, that the honor will belong to us one day.”
As a regular at international film festivals, Jia nabbed the coveted Golden Lion, the top honor at the Venice festival, for his film, Still Life, in 2006. His features Platform and The World were also screened in competition at the Italian festival in 2000 and 2004, respectively.
However, it’s Zhao and Liao that he feels sorry for, noting: “I think they both perform extraordinarily and, while they have won a lot of international acclaim, I really hope their effort will be rewarded.”
As Jia’s biggest budget movie to date, Ash Is Purest White also stars Chinese cinematic heavyweights Feng Xiaogang, Xu Zheng, Zhang Yibai and Diao Yinan.
The crew traveled around 7,000 kilometers to shoot sequences in Shanxi province, the Three Gorges area and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
Despite being widely recognized as one of the country’s top directors, Feng — who won the best actor award at the 52nd Golden Horse Awards in 2015 for his starring role in Mr Six — plays a Chinese-medicine practitioner who is a master of acupuncture.
Xu, known for his roles in the blockbusters Lost in Thailand and Lost in Hong Kong, plays a sci-fi novelist, a character loosely based on Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award, according to Jia.
“In recent years, I’ve been spending most of the time in my hometown (in Shanxi province) and sci-fi ideas have often come to mind,” explains Jia.
With an increasing interest to explore the meaning of time and space, Jia writes Xu’s character as an eloquent novelist who is enthusiastic about outer space and he also created a sequence that features actress Zhao’s character marveling at the vast starry sky in Xinjiang.
“I wanted to shoot a movie that was more like a novel, which covers a long time span and features complex characters,” says Jia, adding that time will help audiences to understand the protagonists and their struggles.
Set from 2001 until present day, the 141-minute film follows a couple of one-time lovers through the huge transformation of China. Zhao’s character, Qiao Qiao, is a goodhearted woman who gets sentenced to five years in jail for protecting her boyfriend Bin, a hooligan with high aspirations, played by Liao.
Any foreign viewer who wants to get the core of the movie should first understand the Chinese term jianghu, which literally translates to “river and lake”.
In Jia’s movie, the phrase’s meaning is rooted in martial arts, where it refers to the lifestyle that the protagonists choose to lead. They are a sidelined, low-class minority who pursue power or money, as well as maintain justice in a system built more on human relations than law.
Chinese cinema has depicted a number of such roles, especially in Hong Kong’s triad movies, with John Woo’s iconic 1986 movie, A Better Tomorrow, as one of the most representative examples.
“Jianghu is a phrase very familiar to the domestic audience, but difficult to understand for their Western counterparts. After consulting with some critics, we decided to keep the pinyin spelling in the subtitles to convey its uniqueness in Chinese,” says Jia.
“For me, jianghu is a legendary world, and it’s also a distinctive way for the Chinese to socialize with each other. I believe it will resonate with Chinese audiences.”
The script, in which Jia focuses more on the characters than the backdrop of an ever-shifting Chinese society — a shared theme in most of his early films — took him three years to write.
“The entire process of creation is very exciting. It reminds me of the small-town life, the romances there and the historic moments we have experienced,” observes the Fengyang-born director. To pay homage to his youth, he shot two-thirds of the movie on film, rather than digitally.
His cast, most of whom are fellow directors, were keen to pay tribute to Jia’s work.
Zhang, known for directing coming-of-age movies like Fleet of Time, recalls that despite the version he watched in Cannes having a soundtrack in the Shanxi dialect and being subtitled in French — both difficult for him to understand — he was touched by the romance between the protagonists.
Director-actor Xu says he was privileged to walk into “Jia’s cinematic world”, that he said for decades has provided a window into China through which Western moviegoers could enjoy the country. genres, sci-fi