Mark Reviews Movies: ASH IS PUREST WHITE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2019

On the surface, writer/director Jia Zhangke's Ash Is Purest White appears to be the story of how a relationship changes over the course of almost two decades. It is that story, of course, as two lovers face a series of challenges in the first 17 years of the current millennium. On another level, this tale is also how changes within the society and culture of China are reflected by the couple and vice versa. It's a simple story of love, that love lost, and maybe something else gained after it all, but within that simplicity, Jia examines layers.

One, then, could look at this story as a multi-year-spanning tragedy about how circumstances and societal change can affect what would, in another place or time, be an individual's greatest happiness. By the end, though, Jia's central theme is even simpler than love and how the world, as well as the passage of time, can affect it. The tragedy isn't in the situation. It isn't in the evolving course of China's economic policies and the country's progression toward modernization. It isn't, for that matter, even in how these characters fight back against or conform to the shift in the culture.

No, the tragedy here is an almost constant tenet of human nature: People typically do not change. The two characters we meet at the start of this story, set in 2001, go through a lot as individuals and as a pair by the time the tale ends in 2017. There are events that seem to strengthen their respective positions in the world, as well as their bond, before a single moment tears them apart. That's the turning point of the story, but in the big picture, gradually revealed over the course of three acts set in three different years, it ultimately looks like little more than momentary pause.

The two lovers are Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Bin (Liao Fan), who live in the city of Datong. Mixing assorted filming formats at the start, Jia shows the city bustling with clubs and lounges.

In a backroom of one of those places, Bin—who fancies himself to be part of the jianghu, an old style of criminal—runs an underground Mahjong parlor, and there's a constant suggestion that his other business ventures are even more off-the-books. An employee returns from a stint in prison, bearing a briefcase filled with cash and a box of foreign cigars. Another associate is planning a real estate enterprise, and just after meeting with this man, Bin discovers that the associate has been killed by some local kids—either in a mugging gone wrong or as gangland-style hit.

Meanwhile, Qiao worries about the fate of friends and family members in the region of her birth. It has been a center of coal mining in China, but private companies and the government are preparing to shut down those mines, transferring the workers to another place and another industry. She fears that her father won't be able to make the change. When she brings up the idea of moving with her father to help him, Bin seems disinterested. When Qiao asks Bin if he sees the two of them as a family, either now or in the future, he delays and deflects.

Everything that happens in the future for these two, apart and as a pair, can be seen in this opening section—maybe even just in that one scene, in which Qiao asserts her desire to be a family with Bin while he evades the notion. The turning point arrives when a rival gang ambushes Bin in his car, also occupied by Qiao (who tests her boyfriend's willingness to go along with one of her impromptu plans just beforehand—which seems unimportant until one sees what she's willing to do for him) and his driver. When Bin is seemingly about to be killed by the gang members, Qiao retrieves her boyfriend's illegal pistol, steps out of the car, and fires it into the air twice to fend off the attackers.

After taking full responsibility for the possession of an illegal firearm, Qiao is sent to prison. Five years pass, and Bin, who ended up in prison for a shorter period of time, has never visited her. He's not there when she's released, either, so Qiao sets off down the Yangtze River to the city of Fengjie (a city that, because of a local dam, will be partially underwater in some years—an unforeseen danger of modernization, which becomes a running theme in the backdrop here), where Bin has taken a substantial job with the local chamber of commerce. Qiao wants to know where she stands in Bin's life.

One can look at this film as a melodrama about a relationship that fails due to time and circumstances, or one can see Qiao, Bin, and their bond as an allegory about China, as the country adapts to the demands of the world without considering the effects on its population. Jia's methodical approach, which sees the drama of its characters as a desperate (in Qiao's case, as she hustles her way to get money and food) or unfulfilling (in Bin's case, who has a new life that could fall apart at moment) attempt to survive in a changing society, allows for either of those.

However one looks at it, though, the film is a melancholy ode to the loss of love, a way of life, and, potentially, the hope that things can get better. The wisdom of Ash Is Purest White is in recognizing that it was always this way. We just can't see that until it all plays out again.

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