The World (Jia Zhangke, 2005)
Plot (From the Adelaide Film Festival): "The dazzling new film from acclaimed director Jia Zhangke focuses on a young dancer, her security-guard boyfriend and others who work at World Park, a bizarre theme park where visitors can interact with famous international monuments without ever leaving the Beijing suburbs. Lavish daily shows are performed amongst replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Pyramids and even the Twin Towers. However the real-life problems and sufferings of this young generation are only put into relief by this facade of cosmopolitanism and Chinese "modernisation"."
Review From the New York Times
Caged in a Beijing Theme Park, Yearning for Something
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By MANOHLA DARGIS
Excerpt: "Globalization and its discontents form the molten core of "The World," the new film from the prodigiously talented Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Set in a sprawling Disney-like entertainment park in a Beijing suburb, the film centers on a young female dancer, Tao (Zhao Tao), whose entire universe seems to begin and end at the complex. Along with her boyfriend, a security guard named Taisheng (Chen Taishen), Tao yearns for a better life but can barely articulate much less envision what a life beyond this peculiarly conceived simulacrum might look like."
The World
by Robert Koehler
Excerpt: "Those members of the chattering class warning of the behemoth named China, and how it will soon take over the planet, have obviously never seen a film by Jia Zhangke. If they had, they would know that China is actually "China"--a dream, a wish, a nation-to-be. They would know, from seeing Xiao Wu, the first of Jia's extraordinary Shanxi trilogy that he made right out of film school in 1997, that a new class of crooks was learning capitalism, and woe to those who didn't catch up. If this didn't drive the point home, then Jia's most closely autobiographical work, Platform, his 2000 epic set in his humble hometown of Fenyang about a performing troupe surviving through the last wheezes of Maoism and into the early gulps of privatization, would have told them that the only constant in this ever-emerging thing called "China" was instability. Two years on, and Jia was showing in Unknown Pleasures that a younger generation more in touch with the Techno Group Orbital than five-year-plans had to hope that a highway being built to their already decaying Sixties-era industrial town would allow them to get the hell out of there. If one of the chatterers had bothered to augment their Jia viewing with a taste of Wang Bing's devastating documentary on wholesale urban and industrial razing and dislocation, West of the Tracks (like Jia's cinema, steeped in the concern to dispassionately observe violent social change and its human cost), they would have realized that there is considerably more doubt and uncertainty among Chinese about themselves at this moment than a televised helicopter shot on CNN of Shanghai's gleaming new skyscrapers and mushrooming coastal industrial sprawl could ever indicate."