An unflinching look at disillusioned youth in China’s mainland doldrums, Jia Zhang Ke’s impossibly affecting Unknown Pleasures unearths a suffocating serenity in the city of Datong that merits more than the critical banalities it garnered. After landing a slot in 2002’s New York Film Festival, Pleasures returned for a cursory stateside stint in early 2003 and flickered for a brief time, like most slow-moving no-name foreign fare, on a small screen in a downtown art house. Those lucky enough to catch it witnessed what is sure to be considered a seminal work of China’s developing Sixth Generation for years to come. Crafted with an unerring eye for adolescent ambivalence, Zhang Ke sculpts a DV monument to the image of modern-malaise that possesses such quietly disruptive elegance, even dreary Datong seems inexplicably alluring. Nonpareil in its unnerving honesty, Pleasures commits itself—like the finest of under-the-radar cinema—to documenting the oft-impenetrable and speciously concieved. Offering an uber-contemporary Chinese youth audiences don’t see on the big-screen, Zhang Ke and his film are a beacon of light shining from a country with censors too image-conscious for their own good.
—MATT PLOUFFE