A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhang-ke, 2018)

Zhao Tao in Ash Is Purest White

Cast: Zhao Tao, Liao Fan, Feng Xiogang, Xu Zheng, Zhang Yibai, Casper Liang. Screenplay: Jia Zhang-ke. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Art direction: Liu Weixin. Film editing: Matthieu Laclau, Lin Xudong. Music: Lim Giong. 

Like many of Jia Zhang-ke's films, the real protagonist of Ash Is Purest White is China itself, undergoing its own character arc in tandem with the people depicted in the movie. It this case, the focus is on Qiao (Zhao Tao), the mistress of the gangster Bin (Liao Fan). When we first meet them, they are partying and Bin is muscling his mob. But that soon comes to a violent halt when Bin is almost beaten to death by rival gang members, saved only by Qiao's firing an illegal gun, which lands her in prison for five years. After her release, she devotes herself to reuniting with Bin, whose own life has taken a mostly downward course. And through Qiao's peregrinations we get a view of China across almost two decades of change. It's an absorbing, sometimes enigmatic film, held together by a magnetic performance by Zhao, Jia's favorite actress. 

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