Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, 2018) (Patreon)

There are times when I feel a bit out of my depth with respect to a given film, and yet of course, despite this fact, I have feelings and reactions to it. At this point in my "career," virtually no film simply leaves me utterly dumbfounded, but there are better and worse reactions, more or less qualified takes on any given work of art. I firmly believe that. For example, I have my strong suspicions that my growing disaffection for Jia Zhangke's films has to do with his increasing coziness with, or willing accommodation of, the official Chinese filmmaking body. But I can't profess to know the intricate ins and outs of that particular political dance, and so it's not exactly fair to a great artist like Jia to just assume that his evolution from a hard-nosed realist to a more sweeping, classically-inclined three-act filmmaker, with a predilection for melodrama and gangster moves, is anything less than organic curiosity.

After all, in this extraordinarily well-informed review, Sam C. Mac articulates not only Jia's career trajectory up to now, but exactly how Ash is Purest White is in many respects a self-referential and summative work, moving us through different phases of Jia's filmmaking and touching upon two decades of his conceptual concerns. Given that this is the case, I suppose we could consider Ash as a kind of Platform 2.0, in the sense that the new film takes us through a relatively long period of social and economic change -- actually, that which occurs just as Platform ends -- but does so through the narrowed lens of the heterosexual couple, rather than the larger collective group.

Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Bin (Liao Fan) are the constant across seventeen years of change, which os not to say that their relationship does not falter during this time. Rather, Jia sets Qiao up as the axis around whom Bin waxes and wanes. As Mac points out, this corresponds rather well to Zhao's role as Jia's cinematic axiom, the light than never goes out, as it were. The film begins on April 2, 2001, with Qiao arriving at the mahjong parlor she runs with Bin. As a mid-credits prologue, Bin dispels a potentially deadly dispute between two "brothers," while the film is still in Academy ratio. Shortly thereafter, we see a close-up of Qiao's fingers snapping to the beat of club music (just before "Y.M.C.A." starts playing) and, with a snap of her fingers, the image goes widescreen. This is an early signal of the degree to which Qiao, not Bin, controls the diegesis.

During this opening act of the film, Bin is the boss, the enforcer, and Qiao is less of a gangster moll than his second-in-command. They are jianghu triads, and they have the world at their feet, until some younger local gangsters make a power move against Bin, as they do. Qiao's act of defiance -- dispersing the triads and saving Bin by firing an illegal gun in the public square -- lands her five years in prison, and everything changes.

The prison sentence as a lengthy ellipsis, which is characterized, both cinematically and in Qiao's own timeline, by Bin's absence. So upon her release, she goes travelling between Fengjie and Dayong to try and find him. This search, which entails a boat trip through the areas soon to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, of course recalls Still Life, but the eventual meeting of Qiao and Bin in a lonely motel room, when it is clear that Bin has moved on, is a somber, Wong Kar-Wai inflected scene that recalls the neon-and-regret tinged tone of Unknown Pleasures. What this demonstrates is that Jia's pivot into more "conventional" entertainments such as A Touch of Zen and Mountains May Depart is not such an extreme one. Yes, his budgets have gotten bigger. But, as we could easily have seen from The World, there has been a substantial ambitious streak in Jia's work for quite some time.

The third act, then, may come as something of a surprise from a narrative standpoint. Granted, in retrospect, Jia clearly offers signposting that Bin may end up in a compromised position. But there is something almost Sirkian in Ash's overall trajectory, in the sense that the self-centered, independent man must come back and rely on the woman whose constancy he always took for granted. In pulling on this melodramatic thread, of course Jia is highlighting the degree to which that strand is present in gangster and martial arts films, such as John Woo's The Killer (explicitly referenced), but also in jianghu triad codes of honor themselves. 

If I ultimately have trouble fully embracing Ash is Purest White, it is only because it is a bit too literary. It is a perfectly constructed film of foreshadowing, symbolism, and narrative comeuppance. I personally prefer the jagged, seemingly free-flowing aspects of Xiao Wu, or, by contrast, the more spacious, open-ended tone of Still Life and Unknown Pleasures. But I strongly believe this comes down to personal preference, and not some form of externally imposed "official" compromise, at least based on the quality on display, and the evidence of Jia's own filmography. This is someone who got a screenwriting prize from Steven Spielberg, and on some level always wanted to be the filmmaker for whom that would be the most logical thing in the world.