Unknown Pleasures

The third verse of critically acclaimed director Jia Zhang-ke's trio of films based on contemporary life in small town China, Unknown Pleasures doesn't stray from its predecessors in its portrayal of disenfranchised Chinese youth coping with the post-Mao era. The digitally shot Mandarin language film, borrowing documentary stylistics, follows the exploits of Xiao Ji and Bin Bin, two unemployed friends with neither prospects nor any real motivation, trying to hold it down in their 'hood with futures dubious at best.

If compared to Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow, America's own recent portrayal of disaffected Asian youth, Jia's film is simpler, less stylized and to that end, less pointed. But purposefully so, the youngsters in Jia's world are helplessly wandering a desolate space while the world changes beyond them. Jia keeps it real and compelling. And his film is relevant to today's Asian American youth because the typical understanding is that we are only physically similar to Xiao Ji and Bin Bin, but vastly different in culture. That is until you consider that despite being a world apart, geographically, economically, politically, etc., we seem to yearn for the same Western ideologies. In his apocalyptic despair--Jia's small town effectively evoking the edge of the world or East New York--youth seek solace in things American, but hardly find escape.

Unknown Pleasures is a poetic ode to disaffected youth in China that should remind us that, far from a U.S. phenomenon, the dispossessed exist in all countries where the system advances without acknowledging its impoverished.

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