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Platform
Actors: Hong Wei Wang, Tao Zhao
Director: Zhang Ke Jia
Number of Items: 1
Format: Color, Widescreen
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Running Time: 150 minutes
Studio: New Yorker Video
Product Group: DVD
Release Date: 2005-08-16

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From Description
""One of the most important directors working today." —Dennis Lim, The Village Voice

"Essential Viewing... One of the most impressive Chinese films I’ve ever seen." —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"Expansive and undeniably brilliant." —Ken Fox, TV Guide Online

The masterpiece of the New Chinese Cinema, Jia Zhang-ke's monumental Platform spans the turbulent 1980s by following four performers in the state-run Peasant Culture Group. Based in Fenyang, the director’s hometown in the remote western province of Shanxi, these "art workers" praise the late Chairman Mao with approved revolutionary classics. When Deng Xiao-ping institutes an "open door" cultural policy and China begins to move toward Western-influenced consumer capitalism, the newly privatized group starts to sport spandex and play electric guitars. It’s sex, cigarettes and rock-n-roll… until dreams are deferred. Platform, the precursor to Jia’s Unknown Pleasures, offers vivid insight into modern China. Rich in detail and beautifully shot, Jia’s epic yet intimate film exquisitely conveys a sense of time passing and ineluctable change.

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"Interesting, but not everyone's cup of tea"
Chinese film maker Jia Zhang-ke has attracted much critical attention in the West. His first two films - "Platform" and "Xiao Wu" - contain significant autobiographical elements as they trace the process of change in China. "Platform", Jia's second film, actually charts the earlier period, the decade from 1979-1989 which encompassed his teenage years (he was born in 1970).

The film follows the experience of teenage - itself a journey into uncertainty as the adolescent seeks to escape from a child's identity and establish an adult one, all the time prone to typical complaints, demands, self-doubts, and all-too-familiar angst. Set the experience of adolescence in a China which is, itself, undergoing rapid, radical change and search for a new identity, and the central characters in "Platform" are seen to be confronted with a particularly disorienting and fraught set of experiences.

Set in the claustrophobia of a 'small' town, "Platform" follows a group of young people who are employed in a theatre troupe - initially as part of the regime's propaganda system, but later privatised and forced to create a wholly new repertoire and objectivity. They are distanced from the peasants and industrial workers - even in the clothes they wear (parents and others complain about bellbottom trousers).

There is stark contrast, here, between the expressiveness of young people in the West, or in Japan, and the bland adolescence of the film's characters. The young people are socially and culturally ostracised. They have time to explore, but there lives have been emotionally censored - they seem to lack the portfolio of emotions we are used to in teenagers. This is a tale of liberation without experience or expectation of what liberty might be. Freedom of self-expression merely means freedom to totally ostracise oneself from friends and family, to cast oneself wholly adrift. There is a tension and fear which permeates the film.

Such is the broad outline, and there is much in "Platform" which is worthy of discussion and analysis. However, it is not a film which is going to find a very broad, sympathetic audience in the West. It is told - there is little plot, merely lots of scenes - in excruciatingly slow detail. It can be very funny - one of the opening shots portrays the troupe performing as a railway train. But the camera is often distant, almost detached from the action, and the action at times is more an exacting exploration of inaction. While it touches on emotions, many of these are not readily recognisable by a Western audience - at times you feel the cultural rift is too great.

An interesting film, perhaps a very interesting film, but not one many people can honestly claim to enjoy. A film to watch, a film which gives you a new perspective on adolescence as you strive to understand the significance of another culture undergoing its own cultural and political angst, but not a film which is going to appeal to everyone.








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