Unknown Pleasures poster & wallpaper

Hongwei Wang, Qing Feng Zhou, Qiong Wu

Two unemployed slackers, neither with job prospects nor motivation, hang out in sheltered town in China trying to make sense of their aimless and uncertain futures. As youths, they struggle for indivi...( read more  read more... )dual freedom and the social responsibility that comes along with it.

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68% liked it

1,144 ratings

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63% liked it

27 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 53 min.

Directed by: Hongwei Wang, Qing Feng Zhou, Qiong Wu, Tao Zhao, Wei Wei Zhao, Zhang Ke Jia

Release Date: March 28, 2003

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DVD Release Date: March 16, 2004

Stats: 72 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (72)

  • columbiatch
    September 2, 2007
    columbiatch
    Jia Zhang Ke is one of the most talented young directors working today. This might be my favorite of his work, perhaps because I can relate to its characters the most. I love his gritty neorealist style that captures the lives and problems of people in a time and place that is ...( read more)undergoing huge social and economic changes. The story is about two teenage boys with no goals, directions, or future. They have no jobs and little money. They feed off of pop culture such as Pulp Fiction and Chinese pop songs, when their lives couldn't be farther away from these distractions. Jia's pacing and plotlessness might turn off some viewers, but his concern is realism, which he uses to capture the social-economic alienation and spiritual malaise of the one-child-per-family generation.
  • Cinema101
    June 4, 2006
    Cinema101
    8/10
    I've never been this intrigued while being so depressed watching a film. This is the kind of film that while interesting, doesn't hit you as "great" until after you've seen it.

    Watching Unkown Pleasures I did notice the ingenuity and unconventionality of the cinematography ...( read more)and the direction of the actors, which go about smart little ways of making the viewer feel what the characters are feeling/going through. In one such ocassion, the most irregular and unsettling of them all, we notice two of the main characters on a motorcycle.
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    We see them from the front as one of them gets on, then move to a side view as they begin to ride off, waiting for the camera to turn and give us a shot from the rear as they ride off into the horizon. What we never get is that rear view we were waiting for. Instead we must indure that side view for a disturbingly long period of time (pictured above). We don't know, can't see, where they are going or if they are safe, and that makes us feel uneasy. It makes us feel, for a short time, exactly how these characters feel everyday.

    The film's characters are the disallusioned youths we tend to hear about from time to time; on the evening news, on the radio, in popular music, and, of course, in countless films. What makes this one different? Other than the fact that it takes place in China? I'd say the film's realism and lack of cliches or retreads in the script (even though the entire film is technically a retread of all those aformentioned films about disallusioned youths). If you feel slightly depressed, as I did, while watching this film it's because it gives us such a strong sense of how youthfullness and adolescence can be wasted and ill-used. Something I'm sure people in other, richer countries can relate to all too well.

    Besides its youth, the film also makes commentary on China's current state of affairs (it was filmed in 2001). There are jabs at China's health care as well as its role in world affairs, or lack there of.

    The title, Unknown Pleasures, is translated directly into english, losing its intended meaning which is "Free of All Constraints"; something which seems to allude the film's 3 main characters as they discover it's something all too hard to obtain; and this, in a country which, not so suprisingly, seems in many ways on the verge of becoming very much like America.
  • ralch
    June 30, 2009
    ralch
    WIDESCREEN. Una película muy hermosa y observadora. Es admirable su retrato de la ambición y el acto de "ir", aún en medio de circunstancias que hacen difícil "llegar". / A very beautiful and observant picture. It's remarkable in portraying the ambition and act of "going", even i...( read more)n the middle of circumstances that make it very hard to "get there".
  • Budgeburgess
    March 10, 2009
    Budgeburgess
    Director Jia Zhang Ke dissects the nature of adolescence and exclusion in a China undergoing rapid political and economic change. He focuses on the lives of young people in his hometown of Fenyang, in Shanxi Province, China. Made on a low budget and without official sanction, thi...( read more)s is a rapidly shot, underground production.

    In "Unknown Pleasures" we follow the chaotic boredom of two young men trying to establish relationships and fill the hours. Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are of the 1980's generation in China, the era of the single-child policy and the national attempt at demographic engineering. Jia blends the loneliness and isolation of the only child with the chaotic loss of identity and role which resulted from failed economic planning.

    Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are stranded in Fenyang, a dead-end, industrially decaying dump. They have no work, no money, no prospects, no future. When they should be growing, embracing the maturity and responsibility of adulthood - or at least enjoying the irresponsibility and rebellion of teenage - they seem trapped in an utterly sterile environment, weighed down by their own burden of hopelessness.

    Jia does not follow a Western narrative tradition - he admires Bresson, whose naturalistic techniques embraced silence and the real sounds of the everyday world. So Jia shoots silences, long passages of inaction between his actors. He argues that life does not follow a script; none of us knows what the next person will say or what our range of responses might be. So he shoots the burden and indecision of silence.

    Jia emphasises that boredom and isolation are a way of life. The two lads occupy a world which is dowdy and derelict, but there are constant messages on the TV to remind them of the outside world and its glamorous presence - encouragement to buy lottery tickets, propaganda about the success of China's Olympic bid, dire warnings of US imperialism ... and Mongolian King holding rehearsals for acts to perform as part of its advertising programme, selling alcohol.

    The Mongolian King sequences prefigure Jia's film, "Platform", where young people perform as part of the State's propaganda machine. Here, they compete to work in a capitalist propaganda vehicle. Their acts are a blend of traditional Chinese influence and a pastiche of Western, teenage pop culture.

    These are the ultimate consumers - they can be persuaded to buy into anything, but their everyday life is a litany of consuming relationships, of making demands of the people around them. They live to consume, but have no apparent understanding of what constitutes happiness. Life is a mechanistic round of boredom, invigorated not by pursuit of pleasure, but by a desire to escape ennui, to find temporary diversion.

    There is no culture, only convention and the lure of notoriety through its rejection, only the pursuit of individuality and identity by becoming something else, someone else, a different person ... the same as others. When the two boys conceive of a robbery to solve their problems, they cannot imagine its consequences, only the gangster image they must present. Hollywood might romanticise and glamorise the criminal - the film makes references to 'Pulp Fiction' - but the reality is dowdy, inept, and self-defeating.

    Jia constantly returns to images of performance in his films - images of people putting on acts, singing, dancing. Simply being is too complex and demanding a state - people have to perform to be noticed and valued, they have to portray roles and identities which others can admire, or at least enjoy. But many of Jia's performers are shambling and inept.

    Jia Zhang Ke is an enigmatic filmmaker. The hand held camerawork, the low budget production, the long silences and naturalistic use of sound, the efforts to capture the burden of time and lack of identity experienced by his characters - all make his films slow paced and often confusing in structure. They are not specifically entertaining within a context of conventional narrative filmmaking.

    But Jia is making potent statements about people and their observation. His films deliver a political commentary on China, but they also offer insights into adolescence and the exclusion of young people from their own culture and the way the vacuum of their life is filled by imported images of glamour. They consume the illusion of style, they consume relationships and one another, but struggle to find an identity which is both coherent and self-fulfilling. They end up acting out performances which, rather than elevating them to significance, simply emphasise their inconsequence.

    "Unknown Pleasures" is packaged in the UK with another film, "Xiao Wu" - I would recommend pursuing this option. These are interesting films which have attracted much critical acclaim and which deserve to be viewed by a wider audience. Be prepared to concentrate, however. These are not performances into which you can intrude, casually.
  • jessy137
    August 26, 2008
    jessy137
    Premier de ce réalisateur, aurait pu être mieux. J'ai hâte de voir ce qu'il a fait d'autres.
  • ravin1882
    May 12, 2007
    ravin1882
    really gr8 movie..u should watch....
  • danperryuk2003
    April 8, 2007
    danperryuk2003
    this is a brilliant film
  • underwearsoup
    November 2, 2006
    underwearsoup
    Meh this movie did nothing for me, I had laughed earlier on in the movie (for the wrong reasons) but other than that this movie is pretty boring. Usually I have it in my to appreciate films like this but I just found nothing to like here. Like what is the plot??? There is no p...( read more)lot, they seem to be heading nowhere, it just concentrated on the 3 people and their experiences which weren't that interesting. This is probably the Seinfield of movies.....without the genius. There are many long, drawn out shots that mean nothing. What was the point in having one scene go like 3 minutes and the only thing happening is one of the characters is trying to get his motorcycle up a hill. There are several scenes like this and most of them felt pointless. I found myself fast forwarding through the last minutes of the movie I couldn't stand it. The director tried to make an artsy film and it just turned out to be fartsy.
  • TastyCrayons
    September 27, 2006
    TastyCrayons
    It says 4 stars on it, but it has no sypnosis. I guess I'll see it. xD
  • guska21
    June 17, 2006
    guska21
    piece of garbage coming to you directly from china... boring!

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