• (2008) CRY ME A RIVER (precedes PERFECT LIFE)

Jia Zhangke goes one (magnificent) step further in his idiosyncratic exploration of both the thin border between documentary and fiction and the self-imposed destruction experienced by China in her march toward a free-market economy. Though factories were once the temples in which socialism was built, with their workers treated as heroes, they are now being dismantled all over the country, and thousands of their employees laid off. Jia documents the closing of the “420” factory (once an airplane engine plant, with military implications) to build a luxury apartment complex, “24 City,” on its site, in Sichuan’s capital city of Chengdu. You see a sign being dragged over gravel, a building imploding as workers are singing “The Internationale”—but mostly you hear the stories, covering a 50-year period, of the people whose lives have revolved around the factory. Among unrehearsed interviews of real workers or ex-workers, Jia inserts staged vignettes: Joan Chen recounts her romantic loneliness as a Shanghai woman exiled in Chengdu; Lu Liping (THE BLUE KITE) remembers losing her little boy in the long trip from Shenyang. Zhao Tao (Jia’s muse) is an apparently cynical, ambitious young woman saddened by the fate of her aging working-class parents. This masterpiece sharply addresses the dilemmas of our changing times.

–Bérénice Reynaud