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Dustin Hoffman
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FILM COMMENT
September/October
OUT OF TIME
By KENT JONES
left: Unknown Pleasures
Jia Zhangke, one of the most exciting movie talents around, is tuned into something very now, so up-to-the-minute that his three movies fairly burst with the fullness of their own insight. In the three indelible features he's made since 1997 - Xiao Wu, Platform, and the new Unknown Pleasures - he's focused on young people and their fragile, tender embrace with their own identity. Better than any other filmmaker around, he understands their close and intense relationships to fashion, and the way pop culture makes them feel both a part of the world and very far from it at the same time. Many people still tend to see Eastern films as reports or snapshots from foreign lands before they are anything else. But Jia's films are too good, too exciting, and too uncannily on the money to be denied their rightful status as supreme expressions of the way many of us live: media-addicted, resigned to momentous change and powerless to understand or affect it.
You can read the complete version of this article in the September/October print edition of Film Comment.
