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ONLINE EXTRA: JIA ZHANGKE WEB INTERVIEW
A Film Comment online exclusive by Michael Berry
above : Xiao Wu
In Platform there is a short but endearing scene where three people pile onto a single bicycle and the middle passenger extends his hands as if he can fly.
Fleeting happiness.
One beautifully shot scene in Platform where you exploit structural angles is the discussion between Wang Hong Wei and Zhao Tao atop the city wall where Wang continually meanders in and out of the camera's view.
This marks the only time in the film that Wang Hong Wei asks Zhao Tao about the nature of their relationship. We decided to shoot the scene on top of the city wall and I felt that using words alone to express their feelings wouldn't carry the weightiness that I was going for. So I starting thinking about the possibility of playing with the angle to visually accent the characters' feelings. Suddenly I discovered that corner with that hidden angle. Basically Wang's pacing in and out of frame represents his inability to completely enter her world and the fact that they seem destined to keep going back and forth, unable to really be together. We actually shot that scene in several ways but none of them seemed to click. Finally I had everyone take a break while I tried to work out a way to handle the scene and that's when I thought of using that cornered angle and it seemed to bring the scene together.
The scene in Platform where a beeper is being passed around to the different members of the protagonist's family, eliciting radically different expressions from each person.
Right. For them, the beeper is a strange, unknown device. And when these new things enter people's live for the first time they are beside themselves as to how to deal with them. During that era, the Chinese people had to continually deal with the introduction of new things and we had no idea what they were. It is a kind of cultural blindness.
It is difficult to find a scene of such understated melancholy and cinematic power as the climatic scene in Platform where Wang Hong Wei dozes off in a chair on a lazy afternoon as his wife takes care of their baby. It is a scene that has been described by Kent Jones in FILM COMMENT as "one of the finest moments in modern movies." Can you talk about that scene?
I wanted to arrange an ending where they return to a state very close to most other Chinese. They were once rebellious, they once pursued their ideals and dreams, but in the end they return to the pace of everyday life-which is where most young people eventually end up.
The challenge came with how to go about expressing the state of the everyday. And then I suddenly thought of an afternoon nap. I can't speak for life in southern China, but in my hometown after starting their careers and getting married most people end up living a very repetitive life where they do the same things every day and the possibilities are extremely limited. A lot of men living this type of life spend all their time at their work unit and come home for afternoon naps. I decided to use this to conclude the film.
The scene conveys such a lonely existence, and does so with such incredible power.
It is a lonely existence. There is no longer any possibility for miracles. There is no hope for change. And then there is that late afternoon sun, shining down as he naps, which also adds another layer to the scene.
Lets talk about Xiao Ji's motorcycle in Unknown Pleasures. Did you intend for the cycle's continual breakdowns to serve as a metaphor for the youth in the film who are young and full of energy but always "breaking down" and apparently going nowhere?
In the original screenplay there is nothing wrong with the motorcycle, so that scene was something that came out spontaneously during shooting. Suddenly the motorcycle wouldn't go up the hill and began to stall. I should have yelled cut right there but I discovered that the actor's expression at that moment was so close to what the character was going through. He looked so anxious, he wanted to make it up the hill, he wanted to get through his youth, and to get the scene right. He kept trying and I kept shooting. Only after this scene did I get the idea of revisiting the stalled motorcycle again at the end of the film. So in the penultimate scene we decided that we would have him run out of gas, but then it rained and the scene was brought to a whole other level.
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The first part of this interview can be read in the March/April 2003 print edition of Film Comment.
© 2003 by Michael Berry
