Rent Ash Is Purest White (2018)

I kept waiting to like it - Ash Is Purest White review by CW

Maybe I just didn’t get it. There are many Chinese movies that I love but this was not one of them. Unlike able characters, dull story. To me a total yawn.

Hard to engage with - Ash Is Purest White review by RJ

Trying to write a review of this film is a difficult task, because it not really have any strong effect on me one way or the other. I certainly didn't find it to be the masterpiece which, as far as I can see, all of the critics did. I didn't hate it either - it was just a moderately engaging, often slightly boring drama that I struggled to find any emotional or intellectual way into.

As with several other of Jia Zhangke's films, it spans a wide period of time (17 years in this case, from 2001 to 2018) and follows the lives of its characters as China changes in the background: towns become unrecognisable; cities are built; the Yangtze is dammed at the the Three Gorges. In the foreground, the narrative first skirts around the edges of becoming a gangster movie before gradually turning into a more intimate investigation of morality and destiny.

Bin is a gangster of sorts, involved in shady property development amongst other things, and is a powerful figure in the underground world that he inhabits. His girlfriend Qiao also occupies a position of power and respect, illustrated by the way she assertively enters the gambling den that the mobsters hang out in, casually thumping each of them on the back. Qiao, following a turf war encounter in which she fires an illegal firearm in order to save Bin from being beaten to death, ends up in jail for 5 years after taking all the blame and saving Bin from serious jail time himself.

So far, so familiar. When Qioa is finally released from jail only to find that Bin has not waited for her and does not wish to see her, the film again flirts with genre conventions and seems briefly as if it may become a simple revenge thriller but ultimately goes in a different direction. Instead of becoming an avenging angel, it seems that Qiao has adopted the righteous moral code of the underground life she knew before prison and this guides her to try and rehabilitate Bin, who has lost his status and later - having had a stroke - the use of the left side of his body. Occasionally, she has the opportunity to take her life in a different direction and leave Bin behind once and for all - in one instance she starts off on a journey with a man who claims to be starting a 'UFO tourism' business and wants her to join him. Shortly into the journey he admits that in fact he is doing no such thing and actually runs a small grocery store. Following this admission, Qiao disembarks the train whilst he is sleeping, but it feels like her decision is not a result of the truth she has just learned - rather, it is her destiny calling her back home and to Bin.

The idea that unearthly forces are guiding Qioa is emphasised when, after leaving the train, she apparently sees a UFO flying overhead. But Qiao's destiny is actually self-created. At some point she decided to adopt her particular moral code and thereafter her life is defined by it. She is seemingly magnetically drawn back to where the film started, in the underground gambling den where many of the old gang still remain. Bin, having been unable to accept his fall from grace, does not share this magnetic pull, and as soon as Qiao has rehabilited him to the point at which he can walk again, he leaves her.

The trouble for me was that I didn't find any of this terribly interesting. I enjoyed Pickpocket and Platform (two of Jia Zhangke's early films), but my recollection of those films is that they were quite rough around the edges - they felt very tactile and the characters in them seemed like real people living real lives. His later work (based on my viewings of this film and 2013's A Touch of Sin) seems too polished to me, as if he has become too comfortable with his working methods, critical status and established audience.

In summary - not a great film but not terrible either. My response after two hours and fifteen minutes was a shrug, and I think I will have more or less forgotten it in a week.