East palaces, West palaces

Jia Zhang-ke's is a ghetto.

By Chuck Stephens

The World

I'D LIKE TO buy The World a Coke and keep it company.

Celebrated Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke's The World, that is – an entirely effervescent film about the children of Mao and Barry Manilow that's set in and around a real-life Beijing theme park filled with miniaturized replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the great pyramids of Egypt, and the entire Lower Manhattan skyline, complete with the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The fourth feature from this leading filmmaker among mainland China's maverick independents, The World is both the first of Jia's films to have been made entirely with Chinese government approval, and his first to depict the dyspeptic aftereffects of life in the big city as experienced by migrant workers from the dead-end upcountry Podunks so devastatingly depicted in his earlier Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures. But where those films centered on singing and dancing as semi-utopian escapes from ruined environments and dreams all too painfully remote, this one is all about discovering that Beijing is scarcely the smorgasbord of opportunity that some envision, but rather a Disney-Vegas land of the dead that leaves its zombie-eyed inhabitants hungry – or humming something on the order of "It's a Small Meal After All."

From the broken-down karaoke romance of Xiao Wu to the break-dance revolution that rocks Platform, Jia's films always seem vaguely on the verge of blossoming into full-blown musicals; the rubble-and-lipstick end-of-the-road-show of Unknown Pleasures sometimes feels like the Beijing Opera as Antonioni might interpret it. The World – which begins with actress Zhao Tao, Jia's recurrent muse and this film's slowly shattering emotional center, striding through the underground corridors of the park's musical theater, and in and out of the dressing rooms of its elaborately costumed showgirls and -boys, assaulting our ears with the indelible screech-refrain, "Does anyone have a Band-Aid?" – is also filled with music, though this time Jia seems freshly determined to mark some careful distinctions between his movie's soundtrack, mainly gaudy instrumental electronica by Hou Hsiao-hsien's frequent composer Giong Lim, and anything that might be construed as a specifically vocalized lyrical sentiment. Fitting enough for a film where the worries of the world – politics, culture, all that stuff – are reduced to gift-shop-sized goo-gaa's and inflatable beach-ball globes, while the emotions of its players are so swelled to super-soap-operatic parade-float proportions that one might want to retitle it As the (New) World (Order) Turns. And yet even as the film focuses more on the singers than on their songs, Jia makes certain that there are still plenty of catchy chorus lines floating around: "The [real] Twin Towers were bombed on September 11," one of the park's security guards excitedly explains to a newly arrived relative from the sticks back home. "We've still got them."

For a world-traveled ironist like Jia, that's the sort of civic pride that borders on a surrealism only the Faustian basement-bargains and sales-pitch spirituality of our post-postmodern and all too "so-called" everyday reality might top. Yet, somehow, that's just what reality has done. Seems the movie's singing-dancing-suffering characters weren't the only ones blinded by the brightness of those show-biz lights. The Chinese government's seal of approval notwithstanding, The World is clearly Jia's most confrontationally political fantasia, a point first made by the scarcely inscrutable slogan of the theme park itself: "See the world without ever leaving Beijing." Independence and freedom in filmmaking, as in everything else, is often but a state of mind, and The World is Jia reminding us that it isn't so much "the world" inside the theme park that's been shrunk down to size; it's the lattice of lost highways and limitless housing blocks that line the horizons all around it that leave the world's citizens feeling shriveled and superdeformed. If Jia's film is an anthem for the state of alienated nations everywhere, it's also a devastating city symphony scored for the silenced screams of country bumpkins literally crushed by the wheels of industry, and the video-arcade anime-emotions and cell-phone-enslaved feedback loops that keep the planet's men and women all-dancing, all-singing as they're sucked into the cogs of society's soul-grinding sex and spectacle machines.

Gorgeous to look at even as you sometimes wish you could look away, The World is another collaboration between Jia and cinematographer Yu Lik Wai, who is also a noted director of musically themed films himself. Certain refrains from Yu's most recent film, a sci-fi dystopia entitled All Tomorrow's Parties, also seem to resurface here, especially in The World's claustrophobic underground passages and neon-illuminated expanses of nothingness; at times it's enough to remind you that even Hal, the rebellious computer-consciousness from Kubrick's 2001, didn't completely lose his marbles before he'd learned a song or two. Should Hal, or the rest of the world for that matter, somehow lose its capacity for carrying a tune, Jia seems more than capable of reteaching it how to sing. Buying the world, or The World, a Coke probably won't cure any of our myriad global ailments at the moment (effervescence isn't exactly what we need), but come to think of it, singing lessons don't sound like such a bad idea. Particularly if – as the forward-thinking Mao, or Barry Manilow, Coca-Cola's minister of jingle-prop, once advocated – the end result for humanity's caterwauling global choir just might be perfect harmony.

'The World' runs Fri/16-Thurs/22, noon, 2:50, 5:40, and 8:30 p.m., Balboa Theater, 3630 Balboa, SF. $6-$8.50. (415) 221-8184, www.balboamovies.com.