Platform
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Tao Zhao Hongwei Wang DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Subtitled); Mandarin Chinese (Original Language) Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen Picture Format: 1.85:1 Running Time: 150 minutes DVD Release Date: 2005-08-16 Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Studio: New Yorker |
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| Used | Used Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $9.99 |
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Movie Reviews of Platform
Movie Review: An ambitious and superbly done work
Summary: 5 Stars
I've seen this 2000 film many many times in the past year or so, though only viewed from my sorry laptop screen, and therefore some of the photographic qualities in the frequent long shots and long takes must have been seriously compromised. Still the play of a rich and varied sound/song/music against the captivating images are masterfully constructed by the prodigious director. The occasional use of black screen and silence are powerful. We see fathers again and again. This film is dedicated to his father, according to the film caption. Though the main characters and actions are limited to a small county performing troupe, this is the most heart-felt, honest, yet quietly resistant/resilient Chinese film about life of youth at the margin of a rapidly changing society in the 1980s, condensed in 2 hours and 40 minutes, framed at a relatively remote and inland yet probably more truthful and typifying location. My main disappointment about it is the absence of events of 1989, though it seems to be alluded in the film from a broadcasted public security bureau notice about some fugitives. This hole/gap may refelct a taboo in Chinese filmmaking, or a tacit statement of the director? But "Platform" is much more ambitious compared to his much acclaimed earlier masterpiece "Xiao Wu," and his later work "Unknown Pleasure," which also deal with small town life in the late 1990s and early 2000s respectively. I cannot help comparing it with Edgar Reitz's 25-and-1/2-hour epic "Heimat 2," which, released in 1992, portrays life of young students and artists and intellectuals in Munich, Germany in the 1960s. And I can't stop wondering what happened or can happen filmically between/beyond "Heimat 2" and "Platform," between leaving home and being at home, between 1960s and 1980s, between 1968 and 1989, between Munich and Fengyang, Shanxi (which is not too far from my birth place), between German and Fenyang-accented mandarin Chinese, between experimental electronic music and Chinese pop/folk songs, between cello and accordion, between first love and the vow "never love again," between first love and first love, between first love and marriage, between Heideger's "Being and Time" and Mao's little red book and Mao's poetraits, between forever-present austere father and absent or dead father, between mother and father, between college-educated and uneducated... I hope to view it on a supersuper large and HD sceen someday in the near future.