The political and social changes that swept China during the 1980s are reflected in the lives of a troupe of musicians in this drama from acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke. In 1979, China is beginning to reinvent itself in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, and change is slowly but surely coming to Fenyang, a small town in the Shanxi province. The influences of the West (pop music, longer hair for men, television, privatization) and the adoption of more modern social conventions (birth control, co-habitation, the abandonment of the arranged marriage) begin to slowly manifest themselves in Fenyang, and two young people, Minliang (Wang Hong-wei) and Chang Jun (Liang Jing-dong), find their own lives beginning to change. Chang Jun becomes involved with Zhong Pin (Yang Tian-yi), and they decide to move in together, which is still against the law and earns them the enmity of their parents. Minliang, meanwhile, openly declares his affections to Ruijuan (Zhao Tao), who finds her own feelings about him carrying greater weight than her father's stern objections. The times also change for the musical group , as they shift from the state-sanctioned political material that had been their staple to Westernized pop music, but they find themselves in a no-man's-land, as there is little audience for either their old repertoire or their new material. Zhantai received its world premiere at the 2000 Venice Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
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An allegorical epic that traces China's snarled transition from Maoism to the economic liberalization of the 1980s, Jia Zhang Ke's Platform is a movie that demands patience -- and rewards it in spades. The movie follows the Fenyang Peasant Culture Group, a provincial performing arts troupe that is forced to change with the onset of privatization. Jia depicts the group's evolution as a tortuous trip to nowhere in particular. Freed from the repressive limits of performing propaganda pieces, the troupe sets off on an aimless path to find an audience and an identity. The group comically reinvents itself as the "All-Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band," a cheesy, '80s-style rock group whose concerts are even more pitifully funny than its name. Laconic and distanced, Jia's technique bears a surface resemblance to the movies of Taiwanese master
Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Jia's still camera, typically capturing his characters in long takes against their bleak environment, suggests not so much a democratic approach to
mise-en-scéne as an intractable world aloof to human concerns. Mirroring the country's dissolution following the reforms of the 1980s, the narrative seems to become more diffuse as the movie proceeds: characters disappear from the story without explanation, the plot seems to ebb in importance, and a general feeling of dissipation persists. By the end, the prevailing mood is one of resignation, intimating perhaps the disposition of a country stung by dashed hopes. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide