Zhangke: Tian Zhu Ding (A Touch of Sin) (2013)

The first vignette in Jia Zhangke’s latest film – a tribute to the great wuxia, or martial arts films of the 60s and 70s - would seem to be a bit of a departure for this master of mood and atmosphere, plunging us into a visceral revenge narrative centring around a disenfranchised factory worker. However, the retribution’s so rapid, so shorn of any martial arts relish, that it’s over before it’s begun, exhausting pretty much all narrative and dramatic tension in the first half-hour. What comes next isn’t anticlimactic so much as  postclimactic, setting us adrift in the odd, meditative space after total revenge, the unsettling peace that descends when there’s not even retribution left to live for, as Zhangke proceeds to converge three more loose vignettes with a camera that itself feels too converged with the world it's describing for either documentary detachment or fictional dissimulation. As in the first section, all three stories are based on recent flash points in Chinese social media, all of which ended violently, but here the violence is immediately subsumed back into the film’s ambient textures, as if retribution were so unthinkable in this world that, even if it happened, it still wouldn’t have happened. As with Still Life, that takes us through a bewildering array of cities in transit, streets and subways where you can almost see industrial alienation devolving into post-industrial alienation before your very eyes, space and time melding into space-time. So uneven is the development across this terrain that there’s no real middle ground between ancient Chinese edifices and giant construction sites – at least, nothing of any permanence, nothing that couldn’t be demolished or flooded out in moments – while even the most venerable ruins feel like works in progress, harbingers of some as yet unimaginable China. It’s rare, these days, to see films set in real time and space where characters are as dwarfed by their surroundings as they are here - even in extreme close-up, there’s usually some vast panorama just out the window, pitched at a scale that’s more otherworldly than even CGI, as if Chinese Generated Images were what all digital spectacle was really yearning to capture. And so it finally feels as if China has colonised capitalism at its most fantasmatic, which can’t help but give the film itself a certain lurid, insatiable ambition, a ceaseless drive from spectacle to spectacle, atmosphere to atmosphere. No less than The World, its ambitions are planetary, as Zhangke strives to envisage the decentred centre of everything we know, in all its unfathomable flexibility.