Unknown Pleasures follows the aimless lives of three disaffected young people. Bin Bin (Wei Wei Zhao) and his friend Xiao Ji (Qiong Wu) are unemployed. Bin Bin spends much of his time watching television with a girlfriend to whom he cannot connect emotionally, while Xiao Ji rides around the depressed industrial city Datong on his motorcycle. They meet an aspiring pop singer, Qiao Qiao (Tao Zhao), and Xiao falls for her, which leads to conflict with her boyfriend, the small-time gangster Qiao San (Zhubin Li). Their attempts to find some purpose are consistently thwarted. Bin Bin tries to join the army but is turned down because he has hepatitis. Qiao eventually dumps her controlling boyfriend, but her singing career goes nowhere.
Jia is considered the leading force in China's "Sixth Generation" of film directors. Unlike the "Fifth Generation," which rose to prominence in the 1980s and included such internationally renowned directors as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, the Sixth Generation focuses not on China's past but rather on its present. Jia, in particular, explores the changes in Chinese life in recent years. He first rose to prominence with Xiao Wu (1997), the story of a pickpocket that marked the start of his association with producer Kit Ming Li, cinematographer Nelson Lik-wai Yu and actor Hongwei Wang. He followed that with Platform (2000), which focused on a provincial dance company over two decades and was his first film to feature Zhao as leading lady. She would appear in most of his later films and go on to become his wife.
While filming the documentary short In Public (2001), Jia was inspired by the desolate factories of Datong in his home province of Shanxi, the alienation he witnessed in the city's population and the possibilities of working with digital video. He expanded those ideas into the story of three disaffected young people of the "Birth Control" Generation, the children born under Chinese regulations limiting families to one child each. Because he shot the film in digital video, he was able to go into production only three weeks after completing the script and shot the picture in just 19 days.
Jia's main themes are alienation and isolation. This is a particular problem for the Birth Control Generation, young people raised without brothers or sisters. As a result, they have little experience in connecting with other people at an early age. In addition, with China's increased openness to Western influences, their chief language for communicating with others is pop culture. Xiao Ji courts Qiao Qiao by discussing Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) before they hit the dance floor in imitation of that picture's John Travolta and Uma Thurman.
The theme of alienation is reflected in Zhangke's filmmaking style. He uses long takes, a technique particularly suited to work in digital video as in Unknown Pleasures, to create a minimalist vision of life that captures his characters' isolation. Those takes contain nuances of his characters' behavior, creating a highly realistic picture of contemporary Chinese life. All of this reflects his two chief influences, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, whose minimalist style showcased realistic images of contemporary Japan in films like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), and Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni, whose languorous films like L'Avventura (1960) and Blow-Up (1966) reflect the alienation of modern life.
Because it was produced outside the state-sponsored film industry, Unknown Pleasures received only a limited theatrical release in the People's Republic of China, though it did quite well there once released on DVD. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. It also was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film by the National Society of Film Critics and won two special mentions at the Singapore International Film Festival. Unknown Pleasures received overall good reviews, particularly from The Village Voice's J. Hoberman, who praised the picture's "concentrated evocation of contemporary China's spiritual malaise." It placed second on Voice critic Dennis Lim's yearly ten-best list, while also placing on 10-Best Lists compiled by Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, Robert Kohler of Variety and Manhola Dargis of the Los Angeles Times.
With his move to state-sponsored filmmaking, Jia began to reach wider audiences at home without sacrificing his personal viewpoint. He continued experimenting with digital video in films like Still Life (2006), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and documentaries like Useless (2007), a study of China's clothing manufacturing business that won Best Documentary at Venice. His films continue to compete at international film festivals, and he even founded his own Pingyao International Film Festival in his native Shanxi in 2017.
Director-Screenplay: Zhangke Jia
Producer: Shozo Ichiyama, Kit Ming Li
Cinematography: Nelson Lik-wai Yu
Cast: Wei Wei Zhao (Bin Bin), Qiong Wu (Xiao Ji), Tao Zhao (Qiao Qiao), Qing Feng Zhou (Yuan Yuan), Hongwei Wang (Xiao Wu), Ru Bai (Bin Bin's Mother), Zhangke Jia (Man Singing in Street)
By Frank Miller
