Flashing you, flashing me

THE FILMS OF writer-director Jia Zhang-ke are both realistic and idiosyncratic. The 35-year-old wunderkind from mainland China has authored four feature-length movies to date: Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures (2002), and The World (2004), which opens in San Francisco and Berkeley Sept. 16.

All four films take as their subjects the lives of twentysomethings, adrift and searching, in modern China: in Xiao Wu, a hapless pickpocket; in Platform, a roving theater troupe; a triumvirate of wannabe hoodlums in Unknown Pleasures; a pair of lovers working in a simulacrum of a theme park in The World. Affecting more existential unease than stylized ennui (though that too), these characters are signs of their times, frustrated by a world that transforms faster than they possibly could. "In all these films I want to talk about the same thing: a changing China and the changing Chinese people," Jia says over the phone. He goes on to say that his oeuvre is a kind of chronicle of the country since the end of the Cultural Revolution. The timeline begins with Platform, set between 1979 and 1990, continues with Xiao Wu, set in the mid-90s, and continues into the 21st century with Unknown Pleasures.

The World, then, continues this timeline, temporally and thematically. The story follows Tao and Taisheng, who have traveled to Beijing to work at the World Park – famed for its collection of miniature replicas of monuments like the Eiffel Tower and the great pyramids of Egypt. The place has kitsch written all over it, but Jia is too in tune with the way pop culture figures in contemporary Chinese life to play it just for camp. (Examples: the a cappella rendition of a Faye Wong song in Xiao Wu – its sweet earnestness makes it the film's centerpiece. Pop intertextuality continues in Unknown Pleasures, which means something like "unfettered cool" in Chinese. The film borrows its title from a Taiwanese pop song that is itself a line lifted from a vintage Chinese poem. The film's denouement finds one of the main characters singing the song.) In The World, technology is the new pop fad, where text-messaging becomes the preferred method of communication. Interestingly, Jia decided to use Flash animation to express this idea in the film.

"There is less and less face-to-face communication between people. If they have anything hard to say, awkward to say, they use SMS [text messaging]. I used Flash to express this because it is young people's favorite in China. Whatever songs they love, whatever they want to say, they would turn them into these simple Flash animations," Jia says. "I think it's a special phenomenon in China that young people live in two different worlds – reality is part of this world, the other is what technology could provide."

With this latest offering, Jia has abandoned Shanxi Province – his home and the setting for his last three features – for the capital city. "A lot of young people go to Beijing to live, without really knowing what to do, like me at the time," says Jia, who moved to Beijing in 1993. "I particularly want to turn this experience into a film – of traveling from a small town to live in a big city."

Another noted difference from Jia's earlier work is that The World is made with the approval of the Chinese censors, meaning that it is the first Jia Zhang-ke film to have a theatrical release in China. His other films were all banned in the country. Jia submitted the film twice to the censors – first as a script, and later as the completed film. To his surprise, he was told only to tone down the cussing in the dialogue. Much attention has been paid to the aboveground way The World was made. While Jia is not surprised at the heightened interest in the topic, he does emphasize that his style has not been cramped. "I didn't change my creative process because I wanted to pass the censors," he says. "I think it's the Chinese film industry that changed and not us – the young filmmakers, and the way we create – that changed."

Still, for Chinese cinema to flourish, the director says, the industry has to transform. "What we call 'censor' is a person, and not systematic regulations. Young filmmakers are hoping that China's censor system could be like the film ratings system in other countries – you can't ban a film from being released, but what you can say is only people of a certain age can see it," Jia says. "We not only have to face the changes brought forth by a fast-paced society, but also the challenges of bringing change to the system." (Fiona Ng)

Perfume, third floor

Burly and handsome, sporting facial hair and black-framed glasses, Alex de la Iglesia would quickly become a bear sex symbol in San Francisco if he lived here. Visiting the city to promote his new film, El Crimen Perfecto, he's living proof that it takes a warm and wickedly funny man to make a comedy with those same qualities. Both de la Iglesia and his onetime mentor Pedro Almodovar usually take parodic aim at TV within their movies, and El Crimen Perfecto is no exception. "We have some things in common, no?" he agrees. "For me, TV is something perverse. It's a hole that demons travel to Earth through – like in Poltergeist."

Initially titled Ferpect Crime, de la Iglesia's latest offering tracks the misadventures of Rafael (Guillermo Toledo), the reigning king of the men's section at a department store, and heir apparent for the title of floor manager. When Rafael's pesky, toupee-clad women's section rival Don Antonio (Luis Varela) steals the job, it prompts a fracas that's witnessed by curly-haired Lourdes (Monica Cervera). The resulting mix of murder and blackmail might seem like an extreme example of retail hell, but de la Iglesia claims otherwise. "They say that in real life it's worse [than in the film]," he remarks, referring to employees at Spain's El Corte Ingles. Comparing Spain's most famous commercial center to the mafia ("El Corte Ingles has its own bank – the money doesn't go out"), the director knows which store he'd target in a stateside version: "If we made the movie in America, we'd make it in Macy's, because Macy's is a legend."

More than one might expect, department stores have figured highly in recent films. They've played host to Will Farrell's misadventures in Elf, Billy Bob Thornton's drunken jags in Bad Santa, the homicidal sparring of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Miranda July's stalkeresque courting gestures in Me and You and Everyone We Know. Of course, a department store is also at the core of Zach Snyder's recent remake of Dawn of the Dead; if Snyder doesn't exploit the setting as overtly as George Romero did in the original, then leave it to de la Iglesia to uncover it as a laboratory for cold-blooded, consumption-crazed capitalist impulses.

"We live in a world that changes continuously, but in commercial centers the time stops," de la Iglesia says. "When I was a child, El Corte Ingles was like a temple. Jorge [Guerricaechevarria, who co-authored the screenplay] would go there and pray, to see the objects and say, 'Someday you'll be mine.' In a shopping center, you can live in a perfect world. Why? Because there are no human beings."

Like most people with a strong sense of humor, de la Iglesia has a fatalist's outlook. Late in El Crimen Perfecto, one of the characters rises to fame by devising clownlike fashions. "The most evil, the most perverted things that exist in the world are clowns," de la Iglesia remarks. "I don't know why – I hate the shoes, maybe. One normal person with a smile coating his face is so stupid, so terrifying. All the bright colors are hard on your eyes. They try to make you happy, but it's pathetic. The clown fashions aren't in my movie just because I hate clowns, though. I think we are clowns. We always imitate what we see on TV and in the shops. We try to be funny in an awful world. We're always trying to be handsome and polite, but everyone lives in a hell."

De la Iglesia loves Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, and Roman Polanski ("Watching his movies, you think, 'This is a really bad guy.' "), but he's a movie maniac who especially loves movies that aren't perfect. El Crimen Perfecto is especially indebted to Roger Corman, with the suave-and-slimy Toledo inhabiting a Vincent Price-like role. "My movie is like The Masque of the Red Death," he says. "That's the plot – a king in a closed castle, surrounded by the Red Death. Inside the castle you have a party with beautiful girls, and everything's okay, but the Red Death is always there, and ultimately you have to dance with her." (Johnny Ray Huston)

'El Crimen Perfecto' is currently playing at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.