Rating:

Reflecting on the problems and challenges of China's transition into the global capitalist market, Jia Zhang-ke's The World presents the World Park (consisting of small scale representations of dozens of the most famous tourist attractions from around the globe) as a microcosm of the ever-shrinking global community.  This metaphor not only functions on a literal level, exposing the hypocrisy of the country's unwillingness to allow its people travel abroad (while proclaiming that you can "see the world without ever leaving Beijing!"), but on a philosophical level, as a hyperreality (in short, where signs and representations of the real mask and eventually replace the real itself) created through the rapid expansion of capitalism.  This balance between the mundane daily interactions between the park employees and the larger observations of the current state of the world is one that would normally be crushed under the pretensions or overzealousness of a lesser director, but Jia intertwines the large and small scopes together so expertly that they never infringe upon one another.  By focusing on the park employees, he allows their confusion and sense of dislocation to take shape over time through several vaguely formed storylines, each stagnant but remaining alive through the inertia of set changes.  They are not tourists but travelers of "the world" of the film, where the Eiffel Tower, the Egyptian pyramids, and the New York City skyline can be experienced in a matter of minutes.  The theme park, one giant commodified version of the world disguised as an actual experience, takes the characters from one place to another, often through a model-sized plane recreating the experience of flying or a tram, leaving them disconnected from an outside reality and all experiences take place in a vacuum where simulated sights and actions stand in for the actual ones.

This strange new reality leaves the characters in a constant state of limbo, struggling to find their bearings and left in relationships where they cannot tell where they stand.  Communication and connection are elusive and as the elemental details and norms of a cultural specificity are replaced by the universal - for example, dialects are lost in favor of standard Chinese in order to adapt to the intrusion of other nationalities - their behavior is informed by imitations of the unknown; i.e., universal signs which have no single specific meaning.  In a scene between the female lead and a Russian co-worker, the two struggle with the language barrier only to feign interaction through symbols (pointing to her wedding ring to see if she's married, drawing the simplistic symbol of man-woman to see if it's her boyfriend's clothes she's washing, showing her a picture of her children).  The communication is simplistic, thus dodging all intimacy keeping them at arms length until later when they begin crying and hug one another - the embrace a reaction to their frustration with their current state of being and the fact that the only thing they share is a sense of being lost.  The short animated sequences and cleverly framed shots of people standing in front of the Leaning Tower of Piza (who frame themselves so that a picture make it look as if they are leaning against the tower) hint at the characters failure to rectify the problems with this world of representations.  They are all part of this game of pretending, putting on a huge, gaudy show to make everyone forget it's not real.  In Waking Life, Sosa remarks that he'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic machine, than just some random swerving.  Between the show itself and their personal lives in their free time, the characters of The World suffer an even worse fate, forced to rotate between the gear and the swerving.  For a few fleeting moments they succumb to the allure of the World Park, only later to find themselves suffering from a failure to delineate between their reality and the creation around them that seems to swallow everything genuine and true that once existed.  The World is less a condemnation of the current state of the world than an attempt to explain and come to terms with it.  In this way, it is not only one of the best films of the year, but also one of the most immediate and important.