I greatly enjoy most Chinese films not to mention films in general. This film I just don't get. I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it. I resumed watching the next day at the point I last remembered seeing. When the end unexpectedly reared its ugly head, I wished that all the characters (vs the actors of course) had died in the movie and put us all out of our misery. These characters had nothing about them to get me interested in them as characters or in their story. They were pure and simple... bored and very boring. Other than a little eye candy in the form of the female lead (who was nonetheless also without any real interest), I saw nothing worth spending the two hours I did with this film. If you have absolutely no inner resources, perhaps you will identify with these characters. Otherwise I'd run when you see the DVD cover.

Jia Zhang-ke's movie is powerful and sad. It concerns what you might call two young semi-urban hicks with no future, both rail-thin, constantly smoking, one Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei), tall and sad-faced, the other, Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong), a smaller guy with a stylish haircut that covers a lot of his face. The former has a girlfriend, but he and she agree to separate while she goes through exams. Then she reproaches him for not asking how she did, but he protests that he's out of the loop so didn't know when she was done. His mother, a Falun Gong sympathizer, says he's useless and he offers to enter the army. But when he has a blood test, it shows he has hepatitis and he's ineligible for military service. The orderly warns him about contact with a girl because it's very contagious. It seems like his life is over.Neither guy has a job and they have no money. Xiao Ji, the smaller, more rakish one, who is all bravado and no follow-through, practically stalks a girl named Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) who's an entertainer for a drink company and who has a petty gangster for a boyfriend. This older punk eventually has Xiao roughed up at a disco for dancing with his girlfriend, and turns out to carry a gun. The girl at first rejects the boy, but then they go together and even sleep together.After he learns he has hepatitis Bin Bin borrows money from a shyster and gives his girlfriend an expensive present in a very sad scene where he won't touch her and she leaves him sitting by himself inertly in a typically desolate train station.Both the pals have dead-end lives. Sometimes the Chinese landscape, a vast rural-turning-into-urban wasteland under construction, reminds one of Italian neo-realism and the poverty of postwar European cities and one may be reminded of Pasolini's 1961 first film about young toughs with nothing to do, Accattone, but these Chinese boys are more passive and inarticulate and lack the Italians' false bravado.Bin Bin starts selling discs to make back the money he owes but that looks hopeless and Xiao Ji's motorbike is starting to break down. Finally they decide to rob a bank. Naturally such a demanding project undertaken by two individuals of such low energy and flair is a complete flop, and the tall boy is arrested while the punk-haired one flees on the bike, but he has to leave it by the side of a desolate highway and hitch a ride in a van.Bin Bin, in jail, is forced to sing a song and he sings a hopeful song about working class people he sang with his girlfriend in front of the TV at a happier moment. The film ends here, with the voice-over of the boy and girlfriend singing over the final credits.The ironically named "Unknown Pleasures" is an infinitely sad, unpredictable, seemingly aimless, but ultimately very meaningful and awesome movie that is at once primitive, real, and deeply touching. This is a great movie. It takes you somewhere you've never been before, somewhere painful and unforgettable. You can say this is a "depiction of the spiritual malaise afflicting Chinese youth as a result of global capitalism" as Howard Schumann has done, but that is to articulate the thing in a way that the participants in the story could not do. Rather, it is a couple of aimless lives awash in a changing modern China pretty near to the bottom of the social scale; but it is also a picture of lack of chutzpah, helplessness, failure to thrive. TV's, always on in some room, show events in and out of China, new construction, criminal prosecutions, a downed US plane, Beijing chosen for the Olympics, and there is talk of dollars and video games and even Pulp Fiction's opening scene, but all this is little more than a noisy distraction for the aimless boys. The young people in Hou Hsiao Hsien's 2001 Millennium Mambo are rather different. They are all good looking hustlers, and they may go nowhere either but they're going to make some kind of splash and spend some money along the way. But while Hou's film seems on the outside looking in cluelessly, Jia enters to the core of his characters' grim shallow lives and etches them on our hearts forever. Jia creeps up on you slowly and then never lets you go. This is the most powerful film I've seen in a long while. Its contents seem trashy and junky, but turn out to be astonishingly vivid and rich visually and aurally, a mix, also, that you've never quite seen before and aren't going to forget even if you want to.Perhaps Jia is the most talented of the "edgy underground film movement" that is the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, but not all his work is the same. "Platform "has more sweep and is more personal; "The World" is more up-to-date and relevant; but this is the one that grabbed me and showed me Jia's raw greatness as a filmmaker. It has more drive and more emotional power than anything else he has done so far.

I don't recall where I read a favorable review of this art film, but if I did I would make sure I don't rent anything else they recommend. This film went nowhere. Two Chinese boys with no motivation. They don't take any risks really, and neither do the filmmakers. I was not left with any particular emotion or thought. Photographically it was OK. Perhaps the filmmaker was going for Bergman type effect of portraying emotional emptiness. And maybe its a cultural translation I'm not getting.Saw parts of China not seen before - the more urban dirty landscape.. So that was a plus. I liked the girl. Her character had the most um, character.

I saw this film at the IFP LA Film Festival on June 16, 2003. It started out pretty well, but became aimless and sort of meandered. I couldn't root for any of the characters. The background of economically depressed mainland China is interesting, but only for a while. After half an hour, I wanted characters I cared about, but this movie didn't have any. It's not that the young actors weren't talented, it's just that the script was anti-climatic and didn't leave me wanting more, I just wanted the movie to end.