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The Criterion Channel Presents: Ash is Purest White (2018)

Few countries have undergone such quick and radical transformation in a span of a few decades as China in the latter part of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. And while that process has gone a long ways towards making China the unmatched global superpower that it is, there have been repercussions to that obviously on the lives of the people who live in China -the worst of these are well-documented. But there is also a more subtle malaise that comes with the decline of whole industries, norms and patterns that become obsolete in the span of just a few years, a world drastically changing before your eyes.
This is the conversation happening beneath the surface in Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White, a 2018 film more ostensibly about the relationship between a woman and her gangster husband before and after they are separated by a five-year prison sentence. Their story is a microcosm of China’s as a whole and its social commentary on the changing shape of their country -with an air of some wistfulness- is reminiscent of Ozu’s sentiments in Japan a little ways east half a century prior. Of course the film is not really able to express these sentiments openly in the atmosphere of state censorship for fear of its interpretation being unfavourable to the government and thus limiting its release. But it speaks loudly regardless.
It is set, for at least its first and last act in the town of Datong, an old mining village in the north, which has already begun to decline by 2001. Zhao Qiao (Zhao Tao) is trying to persuade her powerful mob soldier of a boyfriend Guo Bin (Liao Fan) to leave town in the aftermath of the murder of his boss, but when he is accosted in the street one night, she fires his gun in the open city to deter the assailants and takes the fall for illegal possession by claiming it is hers. When she is released from prison in 2006, having not heard from Bin at all in that time, she endeavours to seek him out and settle the state of their relationship.
A contrast of glamour and seediness characterizes this criminal world in the early scenes, a picture of mobsters living large but in an insular environment. Indeed, Bin and Qiao discuss their future while walking through a decrepit neighbourhood that she seems more cognizant of than he does. This world is on the verge of crumbling and she knows it. Qiao asks about a volcano in the distance, if it is still active; it is not, left only as a monument to what was once powerful, and as a gorgeous backdrop for Bin teaching Qiao how to shoot. Still, the early parts of the film are basked in a glow of contentment, pop music colouring the atmosphere of the gang's favourite haunts. In a breath and in one sacrifice, for Qiao it is all taken away.
Jia examines well and Zhao demonstrates expertly the numbness of a prison sentence, freezing Qiao in a time and context that does not apply to the outside world. All she had going in was her love for Bin and her assumption that this sacrifice for him meant something. When she emerges though, after five years of little word from him, she is a hollower person -but hardened too as she pursues him and closure, learning he is in Hubei with a new girlfriend and has given up crime. The coward goes to the trouble of evading her as much as he can.
But she goes through hoops, revealing a colder personality to the one who had been so concerned about the gun. She fends off hoodlums, manipulates a man's sexual advances, until she has concocted a scheme to force herself and Bin into a confrontation. Zhao masters the subtleties here, the slow-motion heartbreak beneath the surface coming through and reaching fever pitch when they are finally in a hotel room together and Bin not only confirms he no longer wants her in his life but feels nothing over what she gave up for him. The scene is very raw, the once lively, cocky gangster now a shrunken shell next to her while she, bitter and assertive, shames him for the waste of many years' commitment.
The world becomes a touch greyer behind all this, conversations on redundancy and rapid advancements dropping in and out of the narrative, which becomes starker as a metaphor -most dramatically by the final time-jump of more than eleven years -when a Bin who suffered a stroke calls upon Qiao one more time to care for him (recalling Jane Eyre perhaps). It is not so simple as him being analogous to China, changing his tune and forsaking Qiao as representative of its national consciousness, only to depend on her ultimately to take care of him before enacting the same patterns again. But there is something to her quiet, patient but pained nature reflected against a Datong that is even more a shadow of what it was. She is strong and a survivor, but she is left behind. So too have been many.

Criterion Recommendation: Nine Days (2020)
A movie that did not receive its due love and attention when it came out, Nine Days is a fascinating conceptual movie that grappled with existentialism in a very provocative way. A film by Edson Oda that owes a fair bit to Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, it stars Winston Duke as a bureaucratic figure in some empty realm of preexistence determining what potential souls get to be born as humans, at the same time as he struggles to contemplate the unexpected early death of one of the previous souls he sent down to Earth. With Benedict Wong as his assistant, and Zazie Beetz, Bill Skarsgård, and Tony Hale as those spirits vying for a chance to live a life on Earth, it is an impressive and interesting cast to carry this thoroughly unique, creative, and intellectually compelling meditation on the meaning of life. The film is dotted by humour, coloured by its curious production design (the lives of each soul are witnessed through old television screens), and lifted on a sense of optimism even where you wouldn't expect. A beautiful movie, sharp and inspired, about looking at life in a new way. The kind of movie that could use a boost in these times.

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