The World (2004) User Reviews

A Sad Picture of How Modernization is The Same the Whole World Over

[noralee · 8/10 · 15 July 2005]

"The World (Shijie)" is one of the saddest films I've ever seen and is a moving visualization of the tragedy of rising expectations.

While it is set very particularly in China, it achingly proves the universality of the twin globalization pulls of modernization and immigration over the past three hundred years around the world, recalling films from "Hester Street" to "The Emigrants (Utvandrarna)," and films about cities in throes of developmental change, like "Atlantic City."

These are universally recognizable young people - they rebel against and yet feel tied to their families and regretfully break ties with old friends; they fight with their siblings but bail them out; they get lonely, a bit homesick, and bored; they are jealous and ambitious; and they constantly compromise, particularly the women bargaining with the oldest currency. With what is a bit heavy-handed symbolism, the film is specifically set in what I presume is a real amusement park called "The World" on the outskirts of Beijing that replicates landmarks in scaled miniature and focuses on the employees and their extended, inter-connected network of friends and family.

At first, they look to us as swaggering city sophisticates, as they dress-up in international costumes for a park revue, surrounded by emblems of international commercial culture, like fake Louis Vuitton bags and movie posters, such as of "Titanic," They jealously and zealously call each other constantly by the most modern cell phone and text messengers, particularly from the encircling monorail that at first seems like a symbol of modern technology, but is really cobbled together from airplane parts--though one woman wistfully notes that she doesn't know anyone who has been on a plane- a frequent response to a call is "I'm on the train." -- but by the end the canned voice of progress is emblematic of the dead end circularity of their lives as they can't get passports to leave, let alone to see the real landmarks.

Travel is a constant theme visually and of conversation - when a country bumpkin shows up, the surprised greeting is "How did you get here?" such that "I bought a ticket." is not self-evident. -- to the security guards riding camels around the fake pyramids and horses around the fake castles, to the six hour bus ride it takes to another city to pay off a relative's gambling debts, and emphasized through fanciful animated interstices. The ironic geographical headings of the chapters emphasize a character's quixotic goal -- "world.com", "Ulan Bator Evening," "Belleville", "Tokyo Story." Striving as they all are, for these folks even Ulan Bator, the depressed capital of Mongolia, looks like a step up.

There are moving scenes when immigrants with different languages try to communicate to share the commonalities in their lives -- a Russian immigrant is terrified when her passport is taken away, while the Chinese woman is envious that she even has one.

It is a bit confusing keeping up with the various characters, in and out of their work costumes, especially when the two main characters seemed to change so much without explanation, but they are enormously sympathetic so it is devastating as we see their hopes and dreams, however unrealistic or selfish, defeated. And those who succeed do so on very compromised terms.

They are also not very articulate, which writer/director Zhang Ke Jia compensates for by spending a lot of time slowly setting up individual scenes and watching people interact, as we see how different they are in different contexts with different people, as body language becomes more important than words, whether spoken or in text messages.

While the cinematography was beautiful, the print I saw in New York was a bit scratchy and the English subtitles had several misspellings. I'm sure subtitle-dependent viewers lose a lot of the significance of different accents and regional differences among the employees from all over China.

The World Park of Modern China

[uwmasianfilm-1 · 8/10 · 3 May 2005]

While this film is radically different from Jia's earlier films it still packs the same cultural criticism wallop. A commentary on the urbanization of modern day China, Jia has moved into the slick world of government approved film-making without losing touch with the direction of his earlier films. It is tempting to watch the film superficially and dismiss it as a glossy state approved image. However, from my perspective, what is happening in the film is much more subtle; it is form of art-making that is particular to China and its authoritarian governing systems through history.

Practically speaking China has never enjoyed freedom of expression for its artists and writers. In order to get around censorship that came from absolute monarchies or dictatorships artists and writers would use subtle inter-textual messages. For instance, a line or radical would be left out a character to slightly change the meaning within the text. The head radical might be left out of a character describing the emperor to indicate the writers desire that the emperor be beheaded, or something along those lines. They were small enough messages that sympathizers would pick up on them, but a censor (censors usually not being the brightest or most creative people around) would miss it.

It is my opinion that Jia Zhangke is doing something along these lines with this film. It may not be as subtle as the messages have historically been, but a close reading clearly conveys something the government wouldn't be happy with. The Chinese government would like for the world to see them as metropolitan, glitzy, shiny, and new, so Jia, in this first film of his with government backing, uses cinema-scope, modern techno beats, computer animation and up-to-date electronics. But under the glitz is the reality screaming to get through the World Park facade. It is dirty and personal. There is prostitution, crime, and pirate copiers (maybe the theme here is modern Chinese society, as promoted by the government and big business, that is the pirated copy of the rest of the world). The subsistence living youth can all have cell phones, but for all their text messaging they don't seem to be able to communicate. Basically Jia seems to say that the Chinese youth are headed for a future of oblivion under the current direction of their country. It is hard to disagree with him. But at least he he leaves a morsel of hope in the end of it all.

Big budget and glossy special effects

[howard.schumann · 8/10 · 4 October 2004]

Jia Zhangke's The World, his first state supported film, continues his look at the disillusionment of Chinese youth with Western-style globalization but shifts the setting from a rural to an urban environment. Young people work at Beijing's 114-acre "World Park", a sprawling Chinese Disneyland that displays scale models of famous landmarks such as The Eiffel Tower, The Pyramids of Egypt, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, The Taj Mahal, and The Vatican. For most of the low-paid employees, however, it is the closest they will ever come to seeing the world. Jointly produced by the Shanghai Film Group Corporation and Hong Kong's Xinghui Production Company, The World, unlike his previous independent work (Unknown Pleasures, Platform), has a big budget, glossy special effects, animation sequences, colorfully costumed song and dance routines, and uncharacteristic melodramatic plot contrivances.

The film's main protagonists are young Chinese who have come to the city from rural areas to find work at the theme park and come in contact with migrants, petty criminals, and other lowlife characters who seem to thrive in this consumer-centered environment. The plot consists of the turbulent love affair between a dancer named Tao (Zhao Tao) who performs in lavish shows at the park and a security guard named Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) who has trouble remaining faithful to her. Zhao Tao, who has appeared in other Jia films, is sparkling in her role as the dancer whose horizons become more and more constricted. When she tells him, 'You're my whole life.' he replies, 'You can't count on anyone these days. Don't think so much of me.' As critic David Walsh points out, "all the young people have great trouble expressing their emotions to one another; they prefer cell-phones and text messages. The picture of a terribly repressed and repressive society, with vast problems and contradictions, begins to emerge".

The employees live in overcrowded dorms or sleazy hotels and a group of Russian performers have their passports taken away when they arrive and some are forced to become prostitutes. In a heartbreaking sequence, Tao's brother Erxiao is arrested by the police for petty theft, and his brother, a construction worker known as "little sister", experiences a distressing industrial accident. Jia presents the world in small episodes, similar he says to the "way you use a computer-you click here, you click there, each time leading you to another location." The vignettes, however, did not come together for me as a totally satisfying experience and the animation effects seemed showy. The World has stunning visuals and relevant social commentary and I'm happy to see Jia achieve a wider audience by working through the system, but by the end of The World, I felt that the sharp edge of his previous films had been lost.

See the world in a day.

[mercuryadonis · 9/10 · 6 May 2005]

"The World" is set in the tacky eponymous Beijing theme park and details the lives of the alienated young workers who are spiritually and physically trapped there. It's a subtle, delicate, yet powerful film with a directing style that can best described as artfully unobtrusive. The young director/writer is a master of composition, camera movement and sound. Some of the scenes unspool without editing for several minutes, the camera mostly still, sometimes moving with the action but never on the whim of the filmmaker. Sound and dialogue occur off-screen in a way that reminds one of the great Japanese director Ozu. (Indeed, one of the film's inter-titled chapters is called "Tokyo Story".

One of the best examples of this style is a grimy hotel room scene between the lead couple in which very little happens--an attempted seduction, but no sex--that is so authentic it feels almost voyeuristic to watch. In another scene, a father counts and pockets four stacks of money bestowed to him by the authorities for the accidental death of his son, his face an expressionless mask that hides more pain than could ever be shown. In an opening scene the camera tracks a female dancer running through a theatre backstage, pleading for a band aid she will never get--thus slyly presaging the untreatable tragedies that will eventually unfold.

The central characters are so alone, alienated and unable to communicate in any meaningful way--much of the dialogue is spoken into the ubiquitous cellphones--that the closest any two people come together are two woman--one Chinese, the other Russian--who don't speak a word of each other's language.

This is the best kind of social commentary a film can offer, images that show and don't tell. At times it feels plodding--especially the last half hour--some of the characters could use more development, and the animated cellphone sequences seem unnecessary and distracting. But the depiction of contemporary urban China's deepening social malaise--the result of far too rapid urbanization and unchecked Westernization--is troubling enough to make one fear the country's--and the world's--future.

At the crossroad of modernization

[harry_tk_yung · 16 May 2005]

While fifth generation Chinese directors Zhang Yimou succumbed to crowd pleasing, turning out cheap, hollow, showy crap like Flying Dagger, sixth generation Jia Zhangke continues to remain faithful to making movies that reflect the sometimes painful metamorphosis the Chinese populace is going through at the crossroad of modernization. The World is such a recent attempt, although there are comments that this movie has already treaded across the line of commercialism.

"The World" here is a miniature world theme park which might be a novelty to Beijing but not the modernized parts of the world (there was one en route from Toronto to Niagara Falls over three decades ago, albeit at a smaller scale). The story evolves around dancer Xiao Tao (ZHAO Tao) and her boyfriend Tiasheng (CHEN Tiasheng). (While the actor conveniently adopted his real name for the character, Tao in the movie means "peach" while Tao in the actress means "waves", two entirely different words). Through the daily lives in the park (part of which is still under construction) and visits from various friends and relatives of the two main characters, we are exposed to how people interact, think, perceive, love, and more. Many of the sequences and dialogue are so realistic and real that you would wonder if these are simply people in the street asked by director Jia to stand in front of the camera (but some distance away) and converse the way they normally do.

The storytelling is straightforward and efficient, sometimes to the point of being skeletal. The camera is objective, impassionate and some may even call it dull. As if to make up for it, director Jia interspersed the script with animations, sometimes to mark off short episodes, each separately titled.

Not for the general audience, The World has an air of the rough-diamond kind of crudeness that makes it quite appealing to seekers of less main-stream cinemas. I do find it a little too long, even when I watched a two-hour version rather than the 140 minute version billed in the IMDb listing.

On longing and isolation

[gbill-74877 · 7/10 · 5 December 2019]

"See the world without leaving Beijing."

Maybe in America a theme park based on recreating various monuments from around the world would be seen as representing a mix of consumerism and cultural arrogance. In the real-life Beijing World Park that we see in this film, it seems to signal modernization, but at the same time, isolation from the world, and a certain falseness. That falseness can be seen in several other things - faking politeness in awkward social situations, the cheesy tourist photos in front of the model of the Leaning Tower, and believing in commitment and love with another person (the relationships in the film are all strained). Even the choreographed, glitzy dance routines might be seen in a different light. The characters are for the most part earnest and humble, but quietly give off a feeling of longing and desire for something more (maybe the desire to have the ability to break free and see the real world?), and I loved how director Jia Zhangke added the graphic art in fantasy sequences to help emphasize that. The visuals throughout the film are strong as well, but what I was impressed by most was the acting. So many of these scenes truly feel real. The one where the elders accept an insurance payout for their son's death is simply extraordinary, and immensely touching. Overall though, the film was a little slow and sedate for my taste (especially for its length), so it was a near miss for me, but fans of realism will probably like it more.

Unmatched surreal universe brought to life

[smakawhat · 9/10 · 12 October 2005]

How can you truly show disconnection. I think I have truly seen a master in action with Shijie, a film that takes place in a world theme park (this place does really exist) in China.

Zhang Ke Jia is a masterful director. His use of colour and character direction is unreal. One of the things he uses to great effect are arches and hallways. Characters appear in them, or look out of them in what is some of the most visual photography I have ever witnessed. There is also a great conversation scene between two characters who don't share the same language, and the use of reflected light that is truly remarkable, make sure to watch for this scene. But it doesn't end there.

Zhang also does something so miraculous that I thought would be impossible. He borrows heavily from Ozu, particularly a scene that is reminiscent of Tokyo Story and makes something that is uniquely his own.

The basic synopsis of "The World", is of the lives of the workers in the theme park. Some romances develop, a foreign Russian worker Anna is introduced to the group even though she and another Chinese girl Tao don't share the same language. Everyday trials and tribulations happen for these young adults who are trying to work in the 'New China'.

Somehow though with all the issues involved, rural people coming into the cities, technological communication, the erosion of China's agrarian past, the fakeness of place, the exploitation of workers and lead up to prostitution, the camaraderie of friends, the cheapness of life.. somehow all of these themes are jumbled into a glorious presentation that you can't take your eyes off of.

The film is beyond surreal, its real setting makes it all more spectacular and that more effective. I had a hard time separating the actors from the characters, at times I thought I was watching a documentary and I prayed or hoped for someone to do well and be happy and find themselves thinking that these were real people in harsh sometimes difficult situations. "The World" has this effect on you, you can't begin to believe the beauty and harshness it shows, and it tricks you in the most crafty way.

The World is a truly fantastic small place in more ways than one...

Rating 9 out of 10

When The Entire World Is Here, Where Are You?

[boblipton · 7/10 · 22 October 2019]

At the World Park in Beijing, visitors can wander around the globe, taking pictures of scale models of the Eiffel Tower, or the Manhattan Skyline with the World Trade Center intact. The people who work amid its gleaming and well-maintained structures see the underside. It's not just the worn and graffiti-laded back rooms, but the unnoticed weirdness, where one day an actress might be a model on a Milan runway, the next a Japanese tea hostess and the third an African native by a Great Pyramid little taller than she. Who are they when not performing? Are their ambitions work-related or life-related? Is their lack of clear identity a matter of youth, environment or character?

Zhangke Jia wrote this movie, and directed it around the actual park. It's a long movie, 140 minutes in length, and at the end the characters are just as vague and confused as at the beginning. they're still cheering beautiful women, world peace and no freckles, in some combination of being lost, trapped and exactly where they want to be.

realism at its most ironic

[zhangensprachen · 9/10 · 2 August 2005]

Though this movie is to some extent, demanding on the audience, a little patience and decent memory will leave you spellbound after the movie. I do warn that if you don't have the patience for books such as The Idiot, don't watch it. Otherwise, I'm sure it will be enjoyable. Jiangke takes the candor of Yasujiro Ozu's dramas and removes kindness, whimsicality, and love and replaces these with loneliness, harshness, and austerity. Powerful combination. The lead actress acts in a way that seems to forget that it's being filmed for a movie. The level of focus on her part is astounding to me. This is in fact true for the entire cast. The irony of the movie lies in its title: The World - a word that conveys a sense of endless possibility. What you get is quite the opposite - in fact the characters seem to be confined by such a level of endless impossibility that the throughout the film, I found myself fearing an imminent gunfight. That never came but the end is equally, if not, more shocking.

Another waste land

[damien-16 · 4/10 · 15 August 2005]

When you drive through the suburbs of Beijing, or through most of eastern China for that matter, you are struck by its bleakness: grey and brown, flat, ugly, industrialised, big square building blocks covered in bathroom tiles, and fog or smog practically the whole year round. In this perfect illustration of the post-modern wasteland, young people are shown to have no hopes, no illusions. Love is unattainable, communication is impossible. Superficial talk over cell phones is the most intimate they can get. When meeting face to face, they have nothing to say.

The World theme park is a metaphor for the lack of cultural identity that's rampant in China these days. Against the background of this ersatz world, a number of protagonists are followed through a variety of sub-plots, very much like Altman in some of his best (Nashville, Short cuts) and worst (The wedding, A perfect couple) work. As a visual evocation of modern Chinese urban life it's striking. But the characters evolving against this canvas remain underdeveloped. They meet and say nothing, they do not meet but talk by cell phone, still saying nothing. Silence can be very telling, if used properly. But one should not confuse silence with depth.

It is said that traditional values have all but disappeared in China, and all that's come in their place are blatant money-grabbing capitalism where a human life is of little value (look at all those mine disasters) and superficial imitation of an idea of Western "culture" copied from TV. But in my personal experience, Chinese people like to talk, they are not afraid to show their feelings. I often find them much more open than many European people I meet.

To me, Shijie shows a realistic picture of the way modern urban China comes across visually, but I cannot recognise the Chinese people in it.

The Chinese world

[paul2001sw-1 · 9/10 · 3 December 2007]

A friend of mine says that his defining image of modern China is of a marble facade slapped onto a jerry-built wall; and it's this kind of picture that also emerges from 'The World', a touching movie about the lives of a group of workers in a Beijing theme park in which all the planet's tourist attractions are copied in a single location. Beautifully acted, the film provides an interesting insight into the patterns of behaviour of young Chinese; but the underlying tone is melancholic, and this flavour grows stronger as the story progresses; in some ways, it's a tale about the death of hope. But it's done with a light touch, some striking photography and some nicely realised animated interludes. I found it moving and subtle, and ultimately, very sad.

A significant step down for Jia Zhang Ke

[bastard_wisher · 5/10 · 10 December 2005]

Okay, but not great at all. It was a pretty big disappointment, actually, considering that I really liked Jia Zhang Ke's previous film "Unknown Pleasures". This film almost completely abandoned the stark minimalism of that film, instead attempting a Robert Altman-like ensemble piece on a grand scale, complete with sweeping long-take tracking shots. Unfortunately, none of the many story lines prove to be all that compelling. Nearly all of them revolve around young couples and suffer tremendously from stiff, unnatural dialogue and conventional melodrama, both of which are (unfortunate) new traits in Jia Zhang Ke's work. The sheer abundance of dialogue is immediately noticeable, as his previous film was nearly silent. It would be tempting to blame the newfound melodrama on the fact that this is Zhang Ke's first film to be produced with Chinese funding and the the amount of restriction which that entails, but I'm not sure that that's actually the case. I get the feeling that the talkiness and melodrama come rather from the fact that this is Zhang Ke's first film to be set in a major urban center, as opposed the remote, rural towns of his previous films. It's as if he assumes that city life is fast and melodramatic. The constant presence of cell phones in the film plays into this as well, although I don't think this notion is entirely off-base. Also part of this, I suppose, are the film's ill-advised animated sequences, which are amateurish and completely unnecessary, as well as the equally wrong-headed thumping pseudo-techno score, which further encroaches on the possibility for poetic minimalism (which, it should be said, is not completely absent in the film, but rather sidetracked almost as an afterthought).

The film itself is about a theme park which features replicas of worldwide landmarks, including the Great Pyramids, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a miniature Manhattan, and, most prominently, the Eiffle Tower, or rather the young people who work there. It is clear to see from the film how this concept was appealing. At times images such as workers carrying water containers through a miniature Egypt (complete with camel) strike the appropriate, and affective, somewhat surreal tone. But sadly, for the most part it seems as if Jia Zhang Ke relied on the unique location too much, using it as a gimmick, and a crutch for the weak, cliché storytelling. Too often he relies on repetitive, obvious imagery, as well, such as a frequent shots of the replica Eiffle Tower against the Beijing skyline. Also present, I should mention, were pointless on-screen captions, dividing the film into meaningless sections. All and all the film was far from terrible though, and to it's credit it never quite followed through with the terrible situations it sometimes set up, and which I suspected. For example, a plot line involving immigrant Russian workers at the park was left mercifully underdeveloped, although not enough to avoid a bit of embarrassing melodrama. Still, it never got as bad as I was expecting it to, although that is a rather under-handed comment I know. The film's best moments tended to be when the story left the park and moved into the city itself, ironically enough, although it all really amounted to too little too late. Not even the nice (if not incredible) widescreen cinematography could save it from relative mediocrity. Looking back, it's funny and a bit sad to think that the film's best moments were it's opening ones, where Jia Zhang Ke's sense of the comedy of repetition (displayed so brilliantly in "Unknown Pleasues") were in full display.

Capturing the essence of a nation

[knewman-3 · 10/10 · 4 August 2005]

Few directors in any genre anywhere in the world have been able to capture the heart and true essence of a modern nation in just two short hours as Zhang has done with Shijie. After books like Ted Fishman's "China Inc." or Gordon Chang's "The Coming Collapse of China", this film arrives as a breath of fresh air sharing at a very personal level just how a rapidly changing China isn't always dealing with her 'prosperity' and globalization as easily as we would hope. The World is perhaps one of the best modern Asian films in years. We can only hope Zhang Ke Jia will continue to write, direct and interpret his homeland for us for years to come. Shijie is an emotional tour de force on modern China.

Ambitious scope not quite matched by emotional depth

[FilmartDD · 28 February 2005]

Seen at Adelaide Film Festival whose wide screen brought out the puny personal concerns of workers caught up in a giant enterprise of fake construction and make-believe experience. As a reflection on life realities in China today, yes a good dash of cold water. As personal stories, not very engaging except for the charmingly sensitive lead actress. But I wished they would get on with it, just crank up the pace. An over-riding impression of blue-ness remains with the viewer: it is sad without being bitter, but I'd have liked more bite, more red. Director has a big and important thing going: he plays with the falsity of the world in a cinema tradition going back to Melies, and that's real film-making.

Good in a lot of ways, but the characters are kind of uninteresting

[zetes · 7/10 · 20 February 2006]

Zhang Ke Jia is a talented director, there's no doubt. He creates moods and images of beauty and loneliness, ones that feel lived in. Unfortunately, he's not the best screenwriter in the world. There are a lot of themes and points of interest in The World, which is about a Beijing theme park that contains all the world's greatest monuments and the employees who work there. These employees mostly have never been out of China. Some of them have migrated to Beijing from the country, and some have maybe never left Beijing. But much like his previous two films, Platform and Unknown Pleasures, there isn't a single character worth knowing here. I don't understand the (mostly Asian) art-house trend of populating films with characters who are shallow and bored with life. Characters who are bored with life are just, well, boring. Much like Platform, the dozens of characters here are so interchangeable that their mostly trite stories became mixed up in my mind. Someday I think Zhang Ke Jia will make a really good film. The potential is there.

An excellent portrait of local citizens working in the World Theme Park in modern Beijing.

[danielri · 8/10 · 30 March 2005]

If you want to get an aesthetic view on modern China, this is an excellent vehicle. Over two hours long, some scenes are poetic and subtle with an Eastern beauty lovely to behold. English sub-titles are well done.

A big screen experience of common workers from the countryside and the artistic dance community in the big city of Beijing.

There is a lot of smoking... and cell phone use, of course - this is the new China.

Some animation sequences provide creative transitions of scenes.

Not for the adrenaline junkie addicted to violence.

Excellent portrayal of relationships. A true artist behind the camera. The acting is so natural.

The backdrop and chapters are structured around the different national landmarks at the World Theme Park in Beijing.

( 8/10 )

Charlse Dickens of China through his movie camera

[yc955 · 10/10 · 24 July 2009]

It's not a hit movie, it will be a cult classic over time, like many of his other works. Poor folks want to watch "Who wants to become a millionaire" while the limo-democrats want to patronize the 'disadvantaged' by throwing other people's money at the government bureaucrats. But once in a while there comes along a true genius who comes from down below but with a true gift to show to the world what really is like down there in the real world. Jia is one such genius. He's the only Chinese writer director I truly feel proud of.

Only thing about the movie that is kinda disappointing is that I thought the ending of this movie actually betrayed the writer/director's unique style of low key and moderation/ showing something through nothing. To me the ending is really not necessary - I thought the real suffering is in the living not the dead. Maybe Jia ZK wanted to show us he can jerk tears as well if he likes to? Anyway, I was a bit disappointed by this ending really - or the death of the construction worker. Maybe Jia is the new China's Dickens. His movie language is disturbing and profound. What we see through his lens in China is not pretty, but real, excruciatingly real. China is often shown as the high rises in the city, or the shanty towns on the fringe, Jia is the gifted few who show everything else in between as what they really are - and that is the real China most people don't care to see or don't want to see. When you are stuck in between, you don't always get good choices...

Cinema Ominvore - The World (2004) 7.2/10

[lasttimeisaw · 7/10 · 2 January 2021]

"However, the most affecting and indelible impression is the universal sense of displacement, acedia and resignation, and the rapport Tao strikes with fellow Russian dancer Anna (Shcherbakova), a leitmotif crying "lost in translation" human understanding. THE WORLD might rightly pander to an occidental viewpoint of an emerging, monolithic, oriental economic threat and its benumbed populace living in their own shallow world, a mock version of what those fortunate citizens dwelling in the developed countries. That's one crucial reason the film is reckoned as a minor film from Jia, he can't be arsed to even suggest the resilient spirit that aids people through gray days, in lieu, what he tries to evoke is a downcast sneer and a God's view superiority, two years later STILL LIFE (2006) would satisfactorily rectify this error."

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks

visually stunning, dramatically inert

[Buddy-51 · 5/10 · 2 January 2007]

The Chinese film "The World" is set in an amusement park that offers its patrons the opportunity to "experience the whole world without ever leaving Beijing." This it accomplishes through monorail tours of miniaturized replicas of the Eiffel Tower, The Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Vatican, even the Manhattan skyline complete with a pair of still-intact Twin Towers. The movie focuses primarily on a young woman named Tao, who works as one of the performers who roams from "country" to "country" throughout the park performing native dances (her specialty appears to be Indian), and her rocky relationship with a security guard named Taisheng.

The main problem with "The World" is that the setting is so intriguing and visually arresting that it winds up completely dominating the drama, which is as diffuse, meandering and plodding as the direction by Zhang Ke Jia, who shoots his scenes almost exclusively in impersonal medium shots. There's a certain sad irony in the fact that the movie's characters are stuck working in a bizarre facsimile of the world when all they really yearn for is to travel to exciting and far-off places - and start new lives - beyond their own land (the park even features, as one of its attractions, an old defunct jetliner that people can sit in and pretend they're actually going somewhere). Unfortunately, with the movie clocking in at a seemingly interminable 138-minute running time, it is WE THE VIEWERS who ultimately feel trapped by the experience.

There are a number of lyrical moments and haunting images in the film, and Ke Jia does capture with full force the astonishing strides China has made in joining the technological revolution (all the characters have the most up-to-date cell phones, for instance). But all the peripheral virtues of setting and theme can't compensate for the overweening dullness and listlessness of the drama at the core.

Not Jia's best, but still a rich and original piece of work

[Chris Knipp · 8/10 · 27 February 2006]

Jia has kept his style but lost some of his edge in this state-funded effort with its rather relentless harping on the irony of a globalized China whose underlings can't get out of the country and are stuck in menial jobs in Beijing, cut off from their native dialects and where they came from and reduced to expressing their strongest emotions in text messages and cellphone chats. There are compelling moments, like the two main lovers Taisheng (Taisheng Chen) and Tao (Tao Zhao) lying on Taisheng's hard dormitory bed and even the schmaltzy wordless communing between Tao and her Russian friend Anna (Alla Shcherbakova), but in the aimless round of daily emptiness of working at this trashy hi-tech carnival falsification of "The World" outside, which the workers will never see in person, Jia loses the momentum of the turbulent, emotional decade he chronicles in "Platform" or the tragic downward spiral of the two boys in "Unknown Pleasures." I don't object to the animations, because they're thematically unified by always being connected to travel and cellphones and they create a sense of link with the 20-somethings, the generation after the director's that he's focusing on here; the fact that they're glib and kitsch just fits with everything else quite intentionally. So does the New Age-y techno music score, which is annoying and repetitious, but again, intentionally so. This time there is a bluntly ironic contrast between the pretty brightly colored costumes of the World shows the girls put on, and the shabby run down environments in which they live off-duty. The contrast is a little too pat: surely some of the environments -- and there is one, at the train station -- off duty are as glittering and new as the World stage shows. One can't say that Jia has lost the complexity of environment he achieved in his earlier films; he's just limited its focus. One may miss the jangling ambient noise of Platform and Unknown Pleasures, though, and particularly the informative TV broadcasts of the latter, which always fit in context even though they may speak to us more than to the characters.

For me, Unknown Pleasures is by far the emotional peak of Jia's work so far, and hence the film that puts across his themes most powerfully as well. Next comes Platform, which is off-putting and sometimes almost absurdly hard to follow, but which nonetheless obviously has deep personal significance to the director as an authentic portrait of his generation's journey into the Nineties. The World is almost too self-consciously a development of his themes of alienation and globalization and of a generation without hope or aims. The theme park is almost too obvious and too good a metaphor, and it robs his excellent actors of the opportunity to be themselves for more than a few minutes at a time.

What does the ending mean? It seems to mean more than anything else that Jia wants to hit us over the head with the idea that his characters have nowhere to go, and it also seemed to me to be somehow a too-late subconscious attempt to steal from the kind of effects we get in Kiselowski's Dekalog. But it only underlines that this is a world seemingly cut off from any moral system.

The World meanders too long, given the failure to connect emotionally, but it is nonetheless a powerful, rich, and original work and Jia is unquestionably one of the great ones of his generation working today, and representing as he does literally millions and millions of people in a dynamic enormously changing country, he stands as one of the world (small W)'s most important movie directors. Whether "success" in the form of open film-making and state funding will "destroy" him or water down his raw originality remains an open question.

Here's The World For Ya

[crossbow0106 · 6/10 · 29 March 2008]

This is a story set in Beijing, specifically "World Park", a theme park which features replicas of famous buildings/monuments of the world. The slogan is "See the world without leaving Beijing". The story revolves around various workers at the park. I really wanted to enjoy this film, which starts out fairly strong, but then goes on too long. The characters are fairly ordinary, with ordinary life problems/situations, and I wanted more intrigue. I like the idea of the film, but there should have been a more interesting story line. It looks great, it is shot great. However, I finished the film just shrugging my shoulders. This is a case of could have been so much better. Six stars for effort, but ultimately not that great.

I guess the world really is flat...!

[Lucki_Chii · 3/10 · 24 August 2005]

The World is a Chinese independent film with an ambitious concept that didn't quite make it. At all. It opens with an obscure sequence of events and not much else. The characters are low budget workers and dancers in Beijing's The World park. Perhaps the biggest flaw within the film is just how flat and uninspired the main characters are. It doesn't help when random names and faces appear at any given time; it was difficult to remember what the plot was- before you realize that there is no plot. The animated sequences were distracting and visually contradicting. I admit they were cleverly executed but did not seem to serve much purpose otherwise. The dancing/elaborate costumes clashed horribly with the drab scenery. There were way too many pointless scenes that contributed nothing to anything. What was up with the scene where Tao is cast as an African woman? What did that have to do with anything? And I did not care for the friendship of Anna and Tao. It struggled to be heartfelt because they did not speak the same language, but only succeeded in boring me half to death. I did not know what to make of the ending. What did it have to do with anything? I felt that the movie had a lot of potential to start off with, but there was no character or plot development. It tried too hard to make you aware of "industriliazation" and "modernization" but it really didn't add up to much of anything.

I suppose you like watching Chinese people talk/walk/dance/text message, then this is the film for you. 3/10

Life hanging

[chaos-rampant · 21 May 2012]

I'm wholly new to cinema from mainland China; I hear some interesting things are afoot, and perhaps as with so many other things right now, we'll have to start keeping an eye over there for tomorrow being shaped?

Anyway, if we listen to the tagline, this is about the effect of Western urbanization on Chinese youth, which is the same as everywhere else has been, readjusting traditions of centuries. Dialects are eclipsed, family is left behind in some remote village, life in the big city can be harsh and alienates, but this only affirms things we've had a headstart on the Chinese for a few decades now.

The main setting gives this a strange resonance, this is a theme park in Beijing comprising scaled-down replicas of some of the world's most renowned monuments spread over a hundred acres, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal. The metaphor about the whole world being artificially erected is a bit dreary - the place is called the 'World Park' - but makes for some awesome imagery along the way.

Everyone of the small group we follow is a transient in his way, uncertainly caught for a while inbetween stations of life. Roads are a recurring motif, people always going somewhere.

So episodic ordinary life in the shadow of artificial monuments, raw breathing punctuated with song and dance performed on a stage, weariness, boredom, colorful flights of fancy, rivalry, unexpected friendship, death, brazen declarations of love.

But only being introduced to the filmmaker for the first time, I have to wonder; is he a kind of Jarmusch, simply romancing the melancholy drifting of souls beneath the streetlights? Can he be an Iwai or Wong Kar Wai? Subtle, transcendent pulls between worlds of pure weightlessness?

It's too early for me to tell. One thing's for sure, he's got to be one of the most talented with a camera right now. He needs to add brevity, structure to his landscape painting.

A Glimpse Of The World

[N_Sgo · 9/10 · 21 August 2007]

While not as good as some of his previous films, The World is still an excellent movie. Imagine a soap opera director (or a TV ad director) making Italian Neo-realism, and you'll get the right feel. Zhang Ke has a talent to make you feel relieved or even elated while showing reality at its most bleak. He is one of the best directors operating today, none of his films should be missed.

The opening scene in which Tao Zhao asks for a band-aid, dressed in an over-the-top Indian costume, is powerful and touching (and in a way, summarizes the entire film). It is one of Zhang Ke's most memorable scenes (alongside the one in which Hong Wei Wang is cuffed to a street lamp by the policeman in Xiao Wu).

There seem to be two versions of this film. In one we get to see the World Park's manager confiscating passports from the Russian female workers, and promoting a girl in exchange for sleeping with her, in the other version those scenes were cut (and so it's probably the official Chinese version).