Review by Richard Toews.

In Useless Jia Zhangke turns his cinematic eye on the production of clothing in China. The result is a story in three parts, equally distanced and yet intricately linked. Each story organically blends itself into the next.

The film begins with a visual masterpiece of lighting and colour as we are ushered into one of China’s many large-scale clothing factories. The profound reality is the disconnect between people and their social reality. Here the workers fully experience alienation from both their labour and their social surroundings.

Set in tension against the large-scale manufacture is Ma Ke, a clothing designer whose passion is to infuse life into her designs. Indeed, “things made in China don’t feel right,” she says. The irony, however, is that for things to feel right in China, one must go to Paris, to the centre. It is an odd journey she makes, when, for Ma Ke, the fundamental essence of what it is to be Chinese is to return to memory. Memory of what, one might ask, when western models legitimate her Chinese fashions.

The final story, introduced by Ma Ke, embraces the memory she - and presumably Zhange - holds dear. Jia returns to his hometown of Fenyang. Here we see a way of life still lived out in a rural China where clothing has a pragmatic function and nothing more.

The title of the film is borrowed from Ma Ke’s clothing label, but the film is anything but useless. Honing in on the functionality of clothing, Useless becomes an intelligent examination of life in the context of social interaction between individuals who produce clothing as well as between these people and what they produce.

Useless
Jia Zhangke | China | 2007 | 80min

Sat. Sept. 29 | 12:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Mon. Oct. 1 | 9:45 | Empire Granville Theatre
Thur. Oct. 4 | 3:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre