Although it’s 10,000 miles away and two decades in the past, the Chinese town of Fenyang may seem — after you’ve viewed Jia Zhang-ke’s densely challenging two-and-a-half-hour film Platform — as inescapable as your own memory. That might not necessarily be an enjoyable prospect, for in this, his second feature film, Jia’s narrative methods of obliqueness, ellipsis, enigma, and inertia lack the melodramatic pizzazz of such similar films as Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and even the autobiographic meditations of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Jia’s ambition, though, is the same: to re-create the interplay of the outer world — political, social, and cultural — with the individual consciousness through the transcendent power of art.
Art sure doesn’t seem very transcendent in the film’s opening scene. It’s 1979, and the platform is a garishly lit, tawdry stage in the boondocks where the Peasant Cultural Group of Fenyang is on tour putting on that audience favorite Train Heading from Shaoshan. Hoots and whistles greet the players as they hobble across the stage seated on stools, hooting and whistling also as they imitate the title train en route to Chairman Mao’s home town.
Back on the bus, the troupe’s on-stage image of uniformity shatters when the hangdog, bespectacled Minliang shows up late and sullen. Played by Wang Hong-wei, who starred as the title anti-hero in Jia’s debut film, Pickpocket (1997), the malcontent Minliang comes off as an Asian Woody Allen with a James Dean complex. The troupe’s surly director is unimpressed, though, criticizing Minliang on his attitude and poor train imitations. To which Minliang replies that he’s never seen a train in his life.
Such is life in Fenyang, where no train comes or goes and where the troupe inevitably returns after visiting places that are equally dreary. It’s Jia’s real-life home town, and he captures it with a native’s intimacy and despair: the grubby storefronts, the littered streets, the inexorable grayness, and the ubiquitous sound system that blares, depending on the shifting cultural conditions, martial music or pop tunes. Above all loom the walls, granite monoliths encircling the town but also serving as a platform for the few private moments between Minliang and his handful of chums.
Such as Ruijuan (Zhao Tao), a fellow player and the daughter of the martinet local police chief. Her father doesn’t like Minliang ("Just because he wears glasses doesn’t mean he can write," he tells her), and Minliang thinks Ruijuan’s dad has delusions of being in the KGB. Nonetheless, they are drawn to each other, finding escape in the rare showings of Indian musicals in the local movie theater and clinging to their fellow theater workers, who amuse themselves by listening to radio reports from such far-away places as Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia. Yet the dominant response to discontent, desire, and the far-off ripples of change is a bitterness and paralysis reminiscence of James Joyce’s unfortunate protagonists in Dubliners.
For things do change even in this marginal place, if in a marginal way. The local barbershop offers perms, the troupe’s repertoire includes love songs from the city, and before you know it, it’s the late ’80s and the Group has been privatized and is featuring acts like the go-go-dancing twin sisters Mimi and Haha. Minliang himself has turned punk-rocker, wailing out the lyrics to the hit Chinese tune "Platform," a howl against "waiting and waiting" endlessly at a platform where no train arrives or departs, to non-comprehending proles.
Jia mirrors the near-imperceptibility of such change in his narrative, or lack thereof. Most of what happens does so in absentia — characters disappear, executions take place, hairstyles change, regimes are toppled, all off screen. Even what’s on screen is sometimes invisible, as when a key conversation between Minliang and Ruijuan occurs with one or both at various times hidden by a corner of the Fenyang wall. The technique can annoy, but it can also set the stage for unlikely epiphanies.
As when the troupe’s truck breaks down, yet again, out in the middle of nowhere. Minliang plays "Platform" on the tapedeck full blast and, lo and behold, a train does arrive, its whistle blowing and engine thundering in mockery of the troupe’s imitation long ago. They all run to reach it, tiny, brightly lit figures almost lost in the landscape; then, breathless and exuberant, they watch it disappear. Not much of a payoff, it would seem, for a lifetime of waiting, or two and a half hours of viewing. Or maybe it’s what makes all the difference.
