‘Ash Is Purest White’ is a moving gangster love story
“Ash Is Purest White,” the English title of Jia Zhangke’s exquisite and ferocious new movie, references a conversation between a woman, Qiao (Zhao Tao), and her boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan), as they survey an extinct volcano on the horizon. It’s 2001, more than a thousand years ater the last recorded eruptions near Datong, a coal-rich city in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi. Reflecting on the ash still dusting the nearby mountaintop, Qiao marvels, “Anything that burns at high temperatures has been made pure.”
The notion of purity — another word for it might be loyalty — courses through this beautiful, expansive and deeply melancholy drama, in which Qiao will endure her own intense trial by fire. Jia, a master of the long arc, follows the character from 2001 to 2018, a period of sweeping social, political and technological change that he measures in intimate, incremental human terms. Over those 17 years, Qiao will lose everything except her indelible understanding of who she is. She will uphold and question the ties that bind her to Bin, and which bind both of them to this land and its timeworn traditions.
Bin, locally known as “Brother Bin,” is a small-time mobster who runs a mahjong parlor and nightclub. Qiao is a coal miner’s daughter who straddles their two worlds with ease; she’s a formidable partner to Bin, overseeing a few of his rackets and taking no guff from his cohorts. Both of them follow the way of the jianghu, a word that means “rivers and lakes” but figuratively describes a vast community of people dwelling beyond the margins of mainstream Chinese society. Theirs is a rural underworld governed by strict honor codes, spiritual beliefs and occasional eruptions of violence.
That violence has yielded a rich repository of stories, cornerstones of Chinese popular culture that include wuxia martial-arts novels and gangster movies like “Tragic Hero,” a 1980 Chow Yun-fat vehicle that we see Bin and his crew watching early on. It’s a lightly self-reflexive gesture (you might be reminded of Tony Soprano and his love of “The Godfather”), but elsewhere, Jia pulls us into a deeper understanding of jianghu life and its sacred myths and totems, as when Bin compels one of his underlings to confess his debts before a statue of the ancient warrior Guan Yu.
Bin, played with brooding restraint by Liao, pays noisy lip service to this boisterously masculine culture. In a hypnotic early sequence, we are encouraged to lose ourselves in the ebb and flow of Bin’s nightclub crowd as they jam to the Village People’s “YMCA” — the infectious beat is a sly nod to the West’s encroaching influence. But although Bin mostly enjoys his life of crime — the gambling, the dancing, the boozy camaraderie and his own power to intimidate — his ambitions seem oddly muted, and he tends to keep both his power and his temper in check. That might sound prudent at first, but in “Ash Is Purest White,” the weapons come out quickly and without warning.
Bin will soon be caught dangerously offguard, targeted by a rival gang that has litle regard for jianghu diplomacy. Jia unleashes a thrillingly tense action sequence that finds the two lovers ambushed on a public street, a violent confrontation that ends only when Qiao raises a gun and fires it into the air. She will pay the price for her intervention; refusing to admit that the gun belongs to Bin, she is charged with possession of an illegal firearm and sent to prison for five years. No one, least of all the country she once knew, is waiting for her when she gets out.
As usual, Jia builds scenes with a highly observant camera that doesn’t seem to be dramatizing the action so much as conducting panoramic surveillance, gliding gently with the actors in long, fluid takes.