About two-thirds of the way into Ash Is Purest White, the latest triumph by Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke, the heroine, Qiao (Zhao Tao, Jia’s regular leading lady), meets a strange man on a train heading north from the central province of Hubei. Qiao was recently released from prison after serving a five-year term; after tracking down her boyfriend, who didn’t bother to meet her upon her release, she discovered that he had taken up with another woman while Qiao was in jail. Qiao intends to return to her hometown of Datong, though she’s not sure what she’ll do there. Feeling rudderless, she listens to the strange man with rapt attention, as if looking for a sign for what to do with her life. He says he’s headed to an area near the border with Inner Mongolia, where he plans to set up a tourism company that will take people to places where others have claimed to see UFOs. Qiao lies and claims that she’s seen a flying saucer herself, perhaps to earn the stranger’s trust. He concludes the spiel about his prospective business by saying, “The bottom line is, we’re all prisoners of the universe.”
Soon a rising crime syndicate starts to stake out turf in Bin’s region, killing his boss and sending armed thugs to attack Bin and his brothers. Just when things seem to be going poorly for Bin and Qiao, they get even worse. One night a group of men armed with blunt objects stop Bin and Qiao’s car, pull Bin out, and try to beat him to death. Qiao, having been taught to fire a gun a few scenes earlier, steps out, fires Bin’s weapon in the air, and chases the assailants away. In the next scene, Qiao is in handcuffs, being interrogated by police. She refuses to admit that the gun was Bin’s, effectively taking the rap for his possession of a weapon. Jia then cuts abruptly to Qiao walking in a prison yard, the lighting now cool and bluish to signal a shift to a more somber emotional register. Jia reduces the heroine’s five-year sentence to just a few scenes, then shuttles the film forward to the next major passage, when the newly released Qiao goes to Fengjie to look for Bin, who got out of jail four years earlier.
Directed by Jia Zhang-ke. In Mandarin with subtitles. 136 min. Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema.
