海角大神

The extraordinary Chinese director Jia Zhangke鈥檚 鈥淎sh Is Purest White鈥� spans 17 years. There is not a moment in its 136 minutes when one does not experience the moment-to-moment passage of time, its slow sweep and quiet epiphanies. This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

The story is structured in three chapters (as was Jia鈥檚 2015 movie 鈥淢ountains May Depart鈥�). We are first introduced to Bin (Liao Fan), a small-time gangster, or jianghu, in the coal mining village of Shanxi. His girlfriend, Qiao, played by Jia鈥檚 wife, Zhao Tao, who has appeared in almost all of his nondocumentary movies, enjoys being a gangster鈥檚 moll. She loves jewelry and fancy clothes and thinks nothing of asking her chauffeur to drive for an hour to her favorite dumpling shop.

She also has an infirm father who rails against the coal company and lives in聽 run-down public housing. Qiao acts very differently when she is around her father; her caring nature comes through, and we can see that there is more to this woman than we were first led to believe. Her dutiful connection to her father provides the key understanding to her character. She believes that loyalty, and the love that underlies it, is a sacred value. This comes into play when Bin is brutally set upon by a rival gang and she saves his life when she disperses the attackers by firing an illegal gun into the air. Because she was in possession of an illegal firearm, she receives a five-year prison sentence, which she could have avoided by telling prosecutors that the gun was Bin鈥檚. Bin never visits her in prison and is a no-show when she is finally released. With an almost fated compulsion, she sets out along the Yangtze River, to a village at the foot of the Three Gorges Dam, to find him.

It鈥檚 not that she still loves him. In fact, at one point, when they are reunited, she tells him 鈥淚 have no feelings for you, so I don鈥檛 hate you,鈥� and she means it. What is at work here is something more expansive than being spurned. Although early on Qiao was quick to point out that she was not herself a听箩颈补苍驳丑耻, the irony is that it is she, and not Bin or his disloyal cohorts, who unwaveringly abides by a code of honor.聽

Jia鈥檚 movies, which also include 鈥淎 Touch of Sin鈥� and (my favorites) 鈥淪till Life鈥� and 鈥淭he World,鈥� all express in varying degrees his abiding theme: China鈥檚 transition from traditionalism to the corruptions of freewheeling capitalism. He can be heavy-handed about this, and I鈥檝e never quite understood why such a progressive artist should hold such nostalgia for a time when the Cultural Revolution was still in force. Thankfully, 鈥淎sh Is Purest White鈥� is among the least didactic of Jia鈥檚 films. We recognize the subversion of rural China and its ancestral ways 鈥� that Three Gorges Dam will raze most of the surrounding villages 鈥� but the story is centered on Qiao鈥檚 personal quest and not on the vagaries of modern China.

Zhao is remarkable in a complex role that, by the end, reveals what she is fully capable of. Qiao鈥檚 seeming insubstantiality burns away. She suffers but without rancor. Her toughness has a plangency. We recognize that her pursuit of Bin, who has become a broken man, is a way of commemorating her own fierce sense of self. Her devotion transcends, and makes almost irrelevant, the object of her devotion. When she is with Bin, before the breakup, she looks out across the vast countryside to an extinct volcano and says 鈥淰olcanic ash is the purest shade of white,鈥� and we know exactly what she means. The residue of a great passion is its brightest testimony. Grade: A- (This movie is not rated.)