Customer Reviews

Platform

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The movie has almost no plot and almost no character development. There is no action. The camera work is typically from a distance with a fixed camera, creating a very static image. It is a very slow-paced movie, it makes Kore-eda's films seem like Hollywood action flicks in comparison. And it is an incredibly powerful, provocative, gripping movie. Any "flaws" in the movie are clearly purposeful, contributing to the movie's overall effect.

The movie follows a group of young theatre and dance performers from 1979 through the 1980s, and uses them to explore the enormous cultural shift in China from 1979 through the 1980s. They are performers in a small city, with desire for change, to progress. We follow them through the 1980s as the cultural upheavals change their world, and yet they are still trapped. The one scene that best captures the theme of the movie occurs when they are in a bus that has broken down in a desolate location. They hear a train, a sign of progress, of movement, and a connection to the greater outside world. Some of them had never heard a train before, they cheer with excitement and rush towards the train tracks. The train rushes past them, leaving them the same, stuck with their old, broken down bus.

The individual identities of the characters seems unimportant, and purposefully so. We get a sense of lack of not only individual autonomy but also individual identity. The characters are swept along in the currents remaking China, with little control not only over their actions but even over their desires. The camera work further distances us from the characters and their internal thoughts and feelings. There is no character development, further reinforcing the lack of identity and the lack of progress for the individuals. There are tremendous development in clothing, in music, in attitudes, as their environment is completely turned upside down, and yet their lives do not really change. The movie seems to give an incredibly sense of reality, capturing that time and place. The camera work is interesting, often able to create tremendous tension without using the standard gimmicks.

Much of the movie is very subtle and understated. You probably have to be Chinese and to have lived in that environment to fully appreciate and understand the nuances. If you do not already know a good deal about Chinese culture at that time (including Taiwanese/Hong Kong pop culture at the time), than the movie is likely to be fully incomprehensible. But even though it was only partially comprehensible to me, I would still rank it as one of my favorite movies. As a final warning, the movie is completely different from movies by fifth generation Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, etc). For better or for worse, do not expect a film like Farewell My Concubine or Ju Dou.

This is a truly magnificent film... if you're a fan of a certain kind of film. As the title of my review should make clear, the movie really had an impact on me. To this day I find myself thinking about some of the emotional responses in triggered while I was watching it.

It is a slow film (my wife fell asleep during it and she's a fan of many slow arthouse films) and only when looking back at it do you see that it does have a plot - but it certainly isn't a "plot" based movie. Nor is it a rich, sumptuous, colorful, lyrical film like Wong Kar Wai or even Terrence Malick. It's a character piece that unfolds with (upon later reflection) intricately designed and evolving camera work. It's not a flashy film by any means but I found that it had so much to say - and so deeply moved me by the end - that I can't forget it.

Zhangke Jia is one of the most important Chinese filmmakers and so it's also worth watching if you want to see the defining figure of the 6th generation ( (I think he's 6th generation - a Chinese cinefile will correct me if I'm wrong) of Chinese cinema.

I've seen this 2000 film many many times in the past year or so, though only viewed from my sorry laptop screen, and therefore some of the photographic qualities in the frequent long shots and long takes must have been seriously compromised. Still the play of a rich and varied sound/song/music against the captivating images are masterfully constructed by the prodigious director. The occasional use of black screen and silence are powerful. We see fathers again and again. This film is dedicated to his father, according to the film caption. Though the main characters and actions are limited to a small county performing troupe, this is the most heart-felt, honest, yet quietly resistant/resilient Chinese film about life of youth at the margin of a rapidly changing society in the 1980s, condensed in 2 hours and 40 minutes, framed at a relatively remote and inland yet probably more truthful and typifying location. My main disappointment about it is the absence of events of 1989, though it seems to be alluded in the film from a broadcasted public security bureau notice about some fugitives. This hole/gap may refelct a taboo in Chinese filmmaking, or a tacit statement of the director? But "Platform" is much more ambitious compared to his much acclaimed earlier masterpiece "Xiao Wu," and his later work "Unknown Pleasure," which also deal with small town life in the late 1990s and early 2000s respectively. I cannot help comparing it with Edgar Reitz's 25-and-1/2-hour epic "Heimat 2," which, released in 1992, portrays life of young students and artists and intellectuals in Munich, Germany in the 1960s. And I can't stop wondering what happened or can happen filmically between/beyond "Heimat 2" and "Platform," between leaving home and being at home, between 1960s and 1980s, between 1968 and 1989, between Munich and Fengyang, Shanxi (which is not too far from my birth place), between German and Fenyang-accented mandarin Chinese, between experimental electronic music and Chinese pop/folk songs, between cello and accordion, between first love and the vow "never love again," between first love and first love, between first love and marriage, between Heideger's "Being and Time" and Mao's little red book and Mao's poetraits, between forever-present austere father and absent or dead father, between mother and father, between college-educated and uneducated... I hope to view it on a supersuper large and HD sceen someday in the near future.

The movie Platform is a static, artistically misguided, and overly pedestrian portrayal of the sense of stagnation and helplessness that the Chinese felt in the 1980's. The film main focus is a troupe of actors whose struggle reflects the political and social changes that swept China after Mao's death. Over the course of the film the troupe's performances shift from state-sanctioned Maoist propaganda to western candy-pop music, but ultimately they find themselves trapped between two worlds as there is little public desire for either the old or new.

The impression is that the acting troupe, and by extension the city of Fenyang itself, is cut off from the outside world. This disparity might have been the driving emotional epicenter of a stronger film, but unfortunately Platform clings desperately to flawed artistic premise and a pretension towards meta-cinema that eviscerates its own potential. Still, the movie's one strength is the tangible distinction between those trapped in Fenyang and the westernization and modernization of the outside world. Over the course of the "story" modern influences begin to emerge in the lives of the characters, electricity, premarital co-habitation, bellbottoms, birth-control, perms, and privatization of business. To explore the clash of the old and new each of these "advancements" is opposed at some turn, but ultimately end up being unable to propel those trapped in Fenyang into the modern world.

Additionally, there is a deep impression that all of the characters are being left behind, that somehow the world has forgotten them and is moving on regardless. When Zhang Zu, a former member of the acting troupe, returns home from the "big wide world" the disjunct between those trapped and the rest of China becomes clear. Those from Fenyang have no purpose, the closest thing that the characters have to an action scene is throwing mud clods at cars. They are stagnant, without opportunity and hopelessly trapped in a transitional era.
This, I assume, is why the film was so boring. Nothing happened in Platform because in this era of transition Chinese citizens had nothing to do, and they were boring because they were bored. The film attempts to authentically showcase real human interactions, the conversations all have uncomfortable pauses and often the discussions go nowhere. Rather than using exciting archetypes or deliberate characterization, the performers are all dull and interchangeably human. The entire troupe is utterly and completely without purpose, drive, inspiration, or the very things that would make them, by any measurable degree, worth the audience's time.

The film very quickly becomes a period piece, hours of exhaustingly pointless dialogue designed to instill bitter nostalgia in those who lived through the era and disgust in anyone else. Which brings me to a very important artistic point. A piece of cinema does not need to literally instill the feelings that it attempts to portray in order to be successful. For example, a character can be confused without actually confusing and frustrating the audience, any piece of cinema that literally drags viewers to the same emotional distress of the character (especially tedium) has failed. This was what I assume that the director wished to impress upon viewers, but film that effectively portrays the horror of the holocaust does not need to put a bullet in the brainpan of each of its viewers. This film could have either explored its message in an exciting and skillful manner, or kept its bland everyday style and illustrated its point in a fifth of the film's actual running time.


The real tragedy is that Platform may have had something significant to say, but we will never know for sure. There was a brief foray into a coal mining town that ignited some interest, promising a tragically meaningful digression before its dramatic potential (indeed all dramatic potential) was ignored. This film ends as suddenly and inexplicably as it begins, leaving the audience with no sense of permanence or conclusion. And what could have been an endearing and personal take on the identity crisis of the lost generation was stretched and abused into an unwatchable mess. I suspect unironically that Jia Zhangke is just a horrible filmmaker, and that this impossible waste of screen-time achieved international notoriety through a perfect storm of Chinese sentiments, artistic pretentiousness, and cognitive dissidence.