Shijie

Plot synopsis:
The World tells the story of two workers at Beijing World Park: a performer, Tao (played by actress Zhao Tao), and Taisheng (Chen Taisheng), a security guard and Tao's boyfriend. As the film begins, Tao is visited by her ex-boyfriend, who is on his way to Ulan Batur. Taisheng meets Tao and the ex-boyfriend at a small diner and insists on driving him to the Beijing Railway Station. From this awkward introduction, the relationship between Tao and Taisheng grows increasingly strained. Taisheng, frustrated that Tao refuses to have sex with him, is also busy with fellow migrants from his home province of Shanxi. One, Chen Zhijun nicknamed "Little Sister," is a childhood friend of Taisheng's and comes to him looking for a job. Taisheng manages to put him in touch with someone and he eventually finds work as a construction worker.
Tao, meanwhile, meets one of World Park's Russian performers, a woman named Anna. Though Anna speaks no Chinese, and Tao no Russian, the two become unlikely friends. Anna confesses to Tao that she will quit her job and implies that she must prostitute herself in order to make enough money to see her sister, also in Ulan Batur (Tao, realizing only that Anna is upset, tries to comfort her). Later, while at a karaoke bar, Tao runs into Anna and confirms that Anna has indeed become a prostitute. Anna runs away and Tao cries, neither quite knowing what the other is thinking. As for Taisheng, he soon proves to possess a roving eye. When one of his associates asks him to drive a woman, Qun, to Taiyuan so that she can deal with her gambling brother, Taisheng agrees. Taisheng becomes enraptured with Qun shortly afterwards, and the two often meet at Qun's small clothing shop. There, Qun tells Taisheng about her husband, who years before had left China for France. Since then, she has tried with some difficulty to obtain a visa to join him. Though he pursues her, Qun rejects Taisheng's physical propositions.
Taisheng eventually convinces Tao to have sex with him, with Tao threatening that she will poison him if he ever betrays her. His life, however, quickly spirals out of control when "Little Sister" is killed in a construction accident. Sometime after the accidental death of Little Sister, Wei and Niu, two other performers at World Park, announce that they plan to wed, despite the fact that Niu is dangerously jealous and unstable. At the wedding, Tao discovers a text-message sent from Qun, who has at last received her visa, to Taisheng, saying that their meeting and relationship was destined. Believing that Taisheng has indeed betrayed her, Tao is devastated and cuts off contact with him while she house-sits for Wei and Niu. When Taisheng comes to visit her there, she ignores him. Sometime later, Taisheng and Tao have succumbed to the gas leak, presumably in their friends' apartment. As the film fades to black, Taisheng's voice asks, "Are we dead?" "No," Tao's voice responds, "this is only the beginning."

Tags: dramatic

Review:
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
An excellent portrait of local citizens working in the World Theme Park in modern Beijing..
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..
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..
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.
Definitely not for everyone as it's (a) incredibly slow and (b) long (2 hours and 13 mins on the DVD I rented and (c) has some story lines that absolutely do not work.The cinematography is amazing as having been to Beijing, it truly feels like it when they are out and about.
All I see is what has been going on for centuries in most Third World countries--people from the countryside move to the big cities to find a better life.
Some do, some don't.The whole movie seems more like a documentary look into people's lives and that is a credit to the acting.But really, if you haven't been to Asia, I can't really see this being worthwhile renting because it moves at a snail's pace and seems intended for those who love to read meaning into everything.
The people in the film are ordinary people - young migrants from a less prosperous part of the country coming to Beijing in the hope of making a better living and working in a theme park.
And when tragedy struck, grief was shared by many.Jia's work was frowned upon by the China authorities, and I think I know they reason why - Jia did such a good job in exposing the 'imperfections' of modern day Chinese society.
The story of young people at a world theme park in Beijing called The World (Shi Jie Gong Yuan).The park contains scale models of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa etc.
Just like you can see the world without leaving Beijing, so you can go deeply into the lives of these characters without needing a lot of action to occur.
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.
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.
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.
But much like his previous two films, Platform and Unknown Pleasures, there isn't a single character worth knowing here.
It was a pretty big disappointment, actually, considering that I really liked Jia Zhang Ke's previous film "Unknown Pleasures".
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.
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.
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..
I have watched almost every movie made by the director Zhangke Jia(贾樟 柯), and I believe this one is among one of his best(IMHO his best is 'Still Life(三峡好人)').
The characters in this movie are all lower class people, probably the lowest class of modern Chinese society.
Someone compared it to "Hester Street" and "Atlantic City" in the way "it achingly proves the universality of the twin globalization pulls of modernization and immigration over the past three hundred years around the world." The exception is that those two fine movies have plots and characters you care about.
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).
I watch this film in conjunction with a course on urbanization in modern China.
This movie is set in a theme park in China, where some of the more famous monuments of the world (the Eiffel tower, the Statue of Liberty) are reproduced in a much reduced scale.
The main point of this movie seems to be that capitalism and modernization might have brought prosperity to some in China, but not to the majority of the Chinese people, and in any case it has left the country spiritually void, without a common goal for the people with the exception of making money.
While not as good as some of his previous films, The World is still an excellent movie.
The characters are low budget workers and dancers in Beijing's The World park.
I suppose you like watching Chinese people talk/walk/dance/text message, then this is the film for you.