April 9, 2003

BIN BIN, a slouch-mouthed teen in a billowing white shirt, with no job and nowhere to go, sits on the sofa with his girlfriend, Yuan Yuan, soon to head off to university, her future brighter than his. They're watching a cartoon version of the life of one of China's favorite mythic heroes: Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. Bin Bin's been laid off, and his mother is absorbed with two things: her son's descent into slack, and her own religious investment in the controversial Falun Gong. Yuan Yuan (Zhou Qing Feng) has just been complaining that her mother's been on her back, too, for watching television – a news report about the World Trade Organization.

"The Monkey King is lucky," Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) observes. "No parents on his back. He doesn't give a shit about the WTO."

Bin Bin's best friend, Xiao Ji (Wo Qiong), has a haircut like a shark's overbite and a natty white top whose sleeves look like they're going up in flames. He's in love with Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), a local gangster's girl with a Louise Brooks wig who works as a dancer and a promoter of Mongolian King liquor, whose current marketing gimmick promises real U.S. dollar bills concealed in selected bottles. Xiao Ji dreams of collecting the more-than-he-can-really-handle Qiao Qiao on the back of his unpredictable motorbike and the two of them speeding off together down the soon-to-be-completed new highway to Beijing. Much of Xiao Ji's time, though, seems spent in enormous rubble realms – ruined housing blocks, football field-size dead-end zones, expanses of gravel and silt – coaxing his reluctant bike toward the edge of something that might be an on-ramp to the future.

"I had an abortion yesterday," Qiao Qiao tells Xiao Ji just when they start to fall into whatever they're destined for. "Do you still want to do me?"

"I'll soften you faster than instant noodles," Xiao Ji replies, already half drunk on Mongolian King.

A distinctly Chinese realm of Kings Mongolian, Monkey, and otherwise, the world inhabited by these teen spirits is one of decidedly Unknown Pleasures – as per the English-language title director Jia Zhang-ke has given his new film. The Chinese title of the film, Ren xiaoyao, means "free of all constraints"; it's taken both from the writings of Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, circa 300 B.C., and from the title of a successful Chinese pop song of 2001. Like Platform, Jia's extraordinary previous film, which plotted a musical troupe's transition from traditional Chinese theatrics to eventual subsumption under the cultural yoke of break dancing, Unknown Pleasures is a kind of philosophical musical. Members of this teen foursome do occasionally break gloriously into song, both onstage – with the furtive adjustments of stagehands in full and casual view beside them – and off. Indeed, the title song, sung first by young lovers on the verge of an emotional abyss in a ratty video-rental hall, is climactically reiterated in a police station by a solitary hero in handcuffs.

Shot in an exquisite digital-video palette in tones of cement dust you can feel in your mouth and lipstick red gashes of silk and desire, Unknown Pleasures is Jia's version of a hope-I-die-before-I-get-old standard: a rock-and-roll rebel flick set way out at the end of Old Antonioni Road, in a near-Mongolia end zone called Datong. This is the end of the world; a lemming's leap off the edge of adolescence – as well as a free fall into the future of movie-movie-ness, with references not only to Jia's previous films (including the San Francisco International Film Festival favorite Xiao Wu), and to the world of Chinese realism beyond, but also to as odd a third-worldly, video-bootleg, pop-cult treasure as Pulp Fiction. Jia's no postmodernist, though; his breathtaking sensibility and world-pulverizing agility with epic sequence shots point to something totally new in cinema, even as every film he makes seems to gaze back on – and eventually track away from – the things that have to end before the future can begin.

"I'm the immortal Monkey King," Xiao Ji boasts one minute, then rhetorically wonders, "What's so great about a long life? Thirty years is long enough."

"[These kids] are part of the birth control generation," Jia has said about Unknown Pleasures' fearful foursome. "Destiny has doomed them to a solitary existence." For them, the Monkey King, who can leap thousands of kilometers, is the king of a realm beyond limitations. One of the myriad strengths of Unknown Pleasures, though, is that Jia's vision is both with theirs and beyond it. "No one can overcome [the Monkey King]," Jia admits, "yet he won't escape the hand of Buddha, who holds him prisoner in the mountain." So too the ghost teens of old Datong, racing manically through lottery schemes and bank robberies and sudden windfalls of cash until they run suddenly, and permanently, out of gas.