E-Mail This Article to a Friend UNKNOWN PLEASURES

The films of Jia Zhang Ke not only depict the anomie of youth in today’s China, they come close to inducing it. This one plunges you into the ultimate teenage wasteland: the provincial city of Datong, where sullen, unemployed, cigarette-smoking Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) and Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) drift from vast vacant lots full of rubble to fly-blown pool halls and rabbit-warren apartments, a void filled by the noise of TVs, radios, PA systems, and unfinished sentences. The only glimmer of hope comes from fragments of pop culture — the lyrics of a cheesy tune, a half-remembered scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie, the hero of an animated cartoon — promising a world of delights and opportunity just out of their reach. At a dismal song-and-dance promotion for Mongolian King liquor, they behold the minimally talented Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) performing a number inspired by the classic poem of the film’s title. They’re not exactly smitten, but Qiao Qiao stirs Xiao Ji enough that he challenges her "agent," a local loan shark, for her hand.

Don’t look for a Tarantino-esque resolution; Jia’s films achieve at best the wispiest of epiphanies. Although not quite up to the formal mastery of his Platform (2000) or the personal pathos of his Xiao Wu (1997), Unknown Pleasures is a cinematic pleasure that wider audiences should get to know. In Mandarin with English subtitles.