Er shi si cheng ji (2008)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Zhang Ke Jia

Writers:

Zhang Ke Jia (writer)
Yongming Zhai (writer)

Release Date:

5 June 2009 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot Keywords:

Factory | China | Beautiful Woman | Factory Worker | Apartment Complex

Awards:

3 nominations

Cast

Jianbin Chen
Joan Chen	...	Gu Minhua / Xiao Hua
Liping Lü	...	Hao Dali
Tao Zhao	...	Su Na

Also Known As:

24 City (International: English title) (USA) (festival title)
Shisen No Uta (Japan)

Runtime:

112 min

Country:

China | Hong Kong | Japan

Language:

Mandarin | Shanghainese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Certification:

Argentina:13 | South Korea:All | Hong Kong:I

Filming Locations:

Chengdu, China

Company:

Bandai Visual Company

Trivia:

During a press conference at the 61st Cannes Film Festival for the film, Zhang Ke Jia, Joan Chen and Tao Zhao observed a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the 2008 devastating earthquake in China. The film was shot in Chengdu, in Sichuan province where the earthquake struck.

Movie Connections:

Features Xiao hua (1980)

24 City

This review is primarily in response to Barry Freed's, whose take on the film is so wildly different from mine it makes me wonder if we saw the same movie.

I LOVED this movie. I think the quasi-documentary style is wholly winning and adds a lot to the story. As far as defending Jia's decision not to do a "traditional" documentary, I guess I just have to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he had wanted to do a "traditional" documentary, then he would have done so. I feel that Jia is an accomplished enough artist that I can assume he has an instinctive sense of what will best serve a particular story. Clearly, in this instance, he decided on a fact/fiction "blend", and to my mind, he made the right call.

While watching this, I couldn't help but think of Werner Herzog and his theory of "ecstatic truth" ("I know that by making a clear distinction between "fact" and "truth" in my films, I'm able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct." - W. Herzog). While I'm not (necessarily) making a comparison between Zhang-ke and Herzog, I feel that they are very much after the same thing. Whether an essential truth can be best conveyed using actors or non-actors, using a documentary or drama approach, etc. are questions that both directors obviously struggle with, and I feel that they have come to similar conclusions. They (to my mind) have opted to fuse the two approaches, in an attempt to remove intellectual and emotional barriers between the people on-screen and the people in the audience. And more often than not, that approach works, and works in a very powerful way.

Finally, I thought the performances, without exception, were utterly devastating and mind-blowing. I don't know what Jia does to his actors to get performances of that caliber, but whatever it is, he needs to keep it up. I think this is an excellent companion-piece to "Still Life", and a beautiful addition to his body of work. Masterful.