We finally arrived on the Croisette today and in the hustle to get our badge, wade through the crowd for the red carpet premiere of Bertrand Tavernier’s latest, and not keel over from lack of sleep on transatlantic flights, this writer ushered himself into the wrong theater. So instead of seeing Xavier Dolan’s latest, “Les Amours Imaginaires” (our only consolation being when this writer gets back to Montreal, press screenings for the film will be in full swing so he’ll catch it then), we made the serious, serious error of enduring (most of) Jia Zhang-ke’s “I Wish I Knew.”
Before we start, and to be fair, despite the stature Jia holds in certain critical quarters, including some of our own staff, the Playlist generally isn’t that big on the director and for a brief moment while watching the film, we wondered if our reaction wasn’t just the result of our general feeling on the director and being generally tired and cranky after a long flight. But, judging by the scores of people we saw walking out of screening from about 20 minutes in and onward, we weren’t alone. In fact, we only stuck it out for two hours (after we learned the film was 2 hours and 5 minutes so unless that last two minutes is a total mindfuck of brilliance that utterly negates the previous 125, we’re sticking by our review).
Yes, the title of the film leaves itself open to punny insults, so we’ll get one out of the way: We Wish We Knew what kind of movie Jia wanted to make. Combining an earnest documentary, a museum level video presentation, and a tediously metaphorical (and wordless) narrative, Jia’s movie attempts to be a sweeping look at the changes Shanghai has gone through from the Cultural Revolution onward. Unfortunately, Jia has no clue where he wants to begin or how he wants to tell his story.
The film begins by letting ordinary, elderly Shanghainese tell the story of their lives through the revolution, the changes it brought and how it shaped their relationships. Presumably interesting stuff, but Jia leaves out any context at all so that unless you are seriously up on your Chinese history, know key bureaucratic figures, and how the political machine worked, this stuff is dry, dull and boring. Jia’s approach is a good idea, but without any context the movie quickly becomes a string of interviews with increasingly less importance, weight and interest.
And Jia seems to have sensed this because somewhere along the way he shifts gears and decides to talk to actresses, singers and directors of the era. Again, not a bad approach, but we have no sense of what making a film pre- or post-revolution involved, what it meant, who saw it, or how it was received — again, context. Presented chronologically, the film moves into the present day and Jia switches up to contemporary films and filmmakers who explored (or in the case of Michaelango Antonioni, wanted to explore) Shanghai pre- and post-revolution. Jia includes clips from many of the films discussed, and when Wong Kar-Wai’s “Days Of Being Wild” flashed by we honestly wished we had been watching that instead.
Oh yeah, we nearly forgot about Zhao Tao, who plays the unnamed woman who wanders through the “narrative” portion of the film. The less said about it the better, but it includes such riveting sequences as: people waiting for and then getting on an elevator, Zhao crying as she watches a man eat, and Zhao walking around in a thunderstorm with nothing more than a thin, wet, white t-shirt. We have no idea what Jia was driving at here and we’re sure there’s some kind of symbolism to it all. And we’re not idiots, we can deal with metaphor and symbolic sequences, but the director was shoveling a lot of bullshit here and we (and the rest of the audience) weren’t buying it.
Unfocused, unstructured and unconcerned with finding an audience who doesn’t already know their shit on the topics involved, Jia’s film is for a very specific group of people only (and the chances of this getting picked up are pretty much zero; we would be surprised if it finds its way to North American shores). And it’s a shame because “I Wish I Knew” hints at so many interesting topics that could act as their own standalone documentaries: propaganda films under Maoist China, the stories of workers before and after the revolution, and what the revolution means (or doesn’t) to today’s youth. All of them potentially intriguing, would definitely pique our interest, but this one, which mashes all three (and more) isn’t it. But please, no films about mysterious women wandering around Shanghai with an endless supply of white t-shirts. [D]
