Shanghai Triad was a nice movie, though I wouldn't say it was a good movie. Partially on principle in fact, because I find Zhang Yimou's movies to be ridiculously overrated in the west. I think Gong Li is horribly miscast (her role should have been played by someone a bit more lithe), and on the whole I think the film has some messy storytelling, but it does some really nice work with the conventions of the gangster genre.

Two things in particular stand out in the film, one is the use of the theme of the conspiracy that the intended victim is using to his advantage, the second is some of the mother/son themes the work their way into this an other gangster films.

There is not much to be said about the scheme that is used against you plot, other than its a rather charming plot that is used most effectively in gangster films. The point of the plot being somewhere between "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't," and "you can't fight the wrath of God." If one takes the religious dimension of this plot at full face value (which I'm not suggesting that you do, but I have the impression that Borges was playing with it in the several detective stories he wrote around this plot structure) then the gangster form of the plot would have something of a devilish turn to it.

I have a deep sympathy for damned if you do damned if you don't plots, a sympathy that I never quite understood the reason for. The fatalistic plot is as old as Greek tragedy, and there is a seemingly insensible turn of logic in these stories that makes the glory of man his struggle to overcome his own insignificance. People in these gangster plots are going to their death as a moral imperative, which is a strangely beautiful concept. (This might be worth comparing to Blade Runner).

The kind of Public Enemyesque oedipal story I find rather interesting in this film. The boy's "father" is of course evil, and willing to kill him. His "mother" is a risque woman, which is nice. Whats good about that bit of the story is that the morality of both the man and the woman's position are outside of consideration. The reason why the boy sympathizes with the "mother" as opposed to the "father" is that he sees her out of context (or in the context of her actual life, as opposed to her active life), whereas the father is always rather shadowy. So the value judgment here is that the woman is a living thing whereas the gangster is a force. Action, forces that push you forward, always seem to push the boy a little closer to the grave.

Platform is the second movie of Jia Zhang-Ke, who in my opinion is one of the most talented directors coming out of a region that produces more interesting films than any other region in the world at the moment.

One should know when entering this film that its quite long, with no real plot. The film consists of a number of short scenes in the life of a performance group from the Chinese countryside as the country exits communism and enters the market economy. Characters enter and exit the group, but the group slowly disintegrates as the country loses any need for "culture building," and Westernization and the market economy begin to determine what is necessary for the group to do in order to make a living.

There are a lot of issues one could take with the content of this film. The first of which is the way Jia Zhang-Ke depicts westernizations effects on the countryside. He treats the characters fascination with the west largely as comedy, and with a strange nostalgia for communism. While the nostalgia isn't strange in itself, as that feeling is fairly common in ex-communist countries, it is rather strange in this film where he is fairly explicitly criticizing at some points the role of the party in daily life.

The film really encourages you to pay as little attention to the plot as you possibly can. It is fairly easy to lose track of who's who in this film, and I would prefer to think of some of the attitudes depicted in the film as ambivalent rather than contradictory. What the film does in its three hours of scenes without a linear plot, is slowly move the viewer away from watching a film about performers, to watching a film about people. All of the people though, are nagged by a desire to performs. In a clichéd western film though, this would have been a desire for fame and the spotlight. In Platform the characters, who could never imagine performing in these shitty villages as anything vaguely resembling fame, are really desiring performance in itself. Performance though, is something rather more than

Lets take two shots as an example.

In one scene a girl, an ex-performer, is alone, sweeping the police station where she works. As the scene slowly progresses she goes from sweeping to dancing.

In the last scene of the film, a woman holds a baby and does housework while a tea kettle comes to a boil.

Of course, if the scenes are taken literally, then both women (actors) are performing. One is turning the performance of real life in to a stage performance, the other is performing real life, but both of them are performing for us. Performance is a way, for the original group of communist performers, of being for others, that slowly disintegrates into being for oneself. The film is similarly a way of being for others, and as the "performances" go downhill, the authenticity of the way the characters present themselves (are presented) to the audience is always more deeply foregrounded. Until the characters are literally performing their way of being.

Of course then the film ends, and there is nothing at all.

Buy Platform here