Jia's In Public starts as a distant echo to his groundbreaking Xiao Wu (1997): in a train station. Yet, instead of following the evolutions of his central character in a variety of public and private spaces in which he seems to “fit” less and less, Jia assembled 30 shots, recorded over a period of 45 days, of anonymous passers-by, travelers, railroad and bus workers, in and around the small mining town of Datung, in Inner Mongolia. Like Fengyeng, Jia's hometown, in which he also locates the plot of Xiao Wu and Platform (2000), Datung is on the verge of major changes – no longer profitable, the mine might be closed; meanwhile, people want to partake in the new pleasures offered by capitalism, such as dance halls, karaoke, blue jeans. Unflinchingly, Jia's gaze and Yu's camera capture the gap between “life's slowness and hope's violence” (Apollinaire), between the ennui, backwardness, and dreary atmosphere of a small town, and the impatience, hidden desires and private concerns of its inhabitants, that create as many enigmatic narrative vignettes. A man waits in a train station – inquires which train has arrived; a first railroad worker gives him a wrong answer, a second the correct one; the man's relatives, a young couple, finally arrive, carrying a heavy bag. Later, at a bus stop, a skinny woman, dressed in black, whose drawn, white features betray a strange kind of tense beauty, runs after a bus that won't stop for her; in the cold, on her fine heels, she performs a sort of dance to express her frustration, circling around the empty bus stop, shortly joined by a young man with whom she starts a conversation we can hardly hear. Is he trying to pick her up? We won't know; after a while, another bus comes; they hop on. We are now inside a bus. Another one, looking at the passengers at close range; a little boy (one of the rare close-ups of the piece) looks back at us. In a train station, a disused bus has been turned into a restaurant, one of the rooms is a pool hall, another a dancing hall; people come and go, to buy tickets or to play pool, while a couple dance, trying on new steps. In the midst of this agitation, an immobile figure stands out – a bald man, wearing dark sunglasses, sporting a vest and a tie, smiling and smoking in silence, surrounded by a small group of people. He seems in command; he's in business. The camera keeps going back to him, first with a close-up of his face – is his smile friendly, vain or sinister? – to a shot of the wheel-chair on which he is sitting, detailing the miniature portrait of Mao hanging from one of the arms, to a shot of the empty space where his left leg should be... (Is he a wounded socialist hero? a gangster?) Nearby, And, next oblivious, the couple is still dancing. In an adjacent (?) (4) dance hall, people move to a socialist song (“the laborious and courageous Chinese people, marching with vigor into a new age.”)Bérénice Reynaud
Por cierto que yo tengo un as en la manga, encontrado de pura casualidad... Igual te devuelvo la pequeña sorpresa en digamos unas semanas jeje...
No me seas, que no voy a dormir hasta entonces...
Bueno, va, ya que insistes : He encontrado el VCD con subtítulos en inglés de Neon goddesses, primera película de nuestro amigo Nelson Yu Lik-wai De acuerdo .
