“Useless/Inútil”, by Jia Zhang-Ke
“USELESS”, BY JIA ZHANG-KE, FOLLOWS FASHION IN ALL SENSES
In 2006, his STILL LIFE had the chance of not being ready in time. The Venice Festival decision was then to announce Jia Zhang-Ke’s film in competition without announcing it, as a surprise film. It was screened and deserved the Golden Lion it took. We now have, by the most celebrated Asian filmmaker, the new film USELESS.Jia Zhang-Ke is the Chinese filmmaker of urgent themes. His works register with suspicion the signs of the eager economical progress of the Chinese state capitalism model, insensitive to the consequences on the population and millenary cultures of huge China. The worst part is that the Chinese model of eager capitalism has its victims also outside China, by selling its cheap products without competition to the whole world.
And in 2007, the 64th edition of the Venice Festival, according to confidences by Jia Zhang-Ke, almost didn’t get the print of USELESS (WUYONG), whose images for the second and third parts were still being shot on the second week of August in China.
USELESS directs its glance to three different aspects of fashion and clothing factories. About the ones who make clothes and the ones who wear them. The first part of the film is concentrated in a large-scale clothing factory in Canton. The damp heat is fought by many fans. The employees follow a mechanical ritual, even during meals and medical duties. They look as apathetic as in the relation they have with the clothes they sew, which will soon sent away around the world, to unknown clients.
In the second part of his docudrama, Jia Zhang-Ke follows the final preparations of stylist Ma Ke for an impressive installation for the Paris Fashion Week. Ma Ke makes live sculptures, wearing organic clothes, and among them, different from other fashion shows, it is the audience who parades. Ma Ke, who is acclaimed as an anti-fashion designer, is also seen in her recently opened fashion shop in China, exactly named “Wu Yong” (Useless). “It is absurd that China exports so many products around the world and doesn’t have any well-known brand”, she utters. Her brand “Useless”, of simple, comfortable clothes, very different from the ones seen in her protest-installation, gains, with Jia Zhang-Ke, instant world projection.
In the third part we see in USELESS the desolate landscapes of modern China with the melancholic decadence of traditional tailor workshops, where the last clients will have their clothes made. Old tailor craftsmen now work in coal mining. After a body washing ritual at the end of the miners’ working journey, Jia Zhang-Ke proves once again to the spectator, with a few dialogues between a couple, why he is indeed one of the great genius of modern cinema. Once again his film deals with resistance and humanism. Despite all vicissitudes, the former tailor and now miner, besides his wife, gets ready for a motorcycle ride. And is proud of the clothes she is wearing, which he bought himself at a shop to give to her. The model she wears is certainly not for sale in a so-called high-fashion shop, like the ones we see in the film too. It is not a piece to be shown off for its brand, to show the buying power of the one wearing it… It is a sign of affection. A feeling that is not lost in Jia Zhang-Ke’s film, despite all risks of modernity.
English version: Laura Rebessi
Photo gallery
Jia Zhang-Ke, Ma Ke and Takeshi Kitano
Ma Ke