Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
As a decades-old state-run aeronautics munitions factory in downtown Chengdu, China is being torn down for the construction of the titular luxury apartment complex, director Jia Zhangke interviews various people affiliated with it about their experiences.
Jia Zhangke's hybrid documentary-fiction blurs the line between real testimony and scripted performance in ways that are genuinely singular — some interviewees are actual workers, others are actors playing composite figures, and the film never fully discloses which is which. The wide-frame, still cinematography captures Chengdu's industrial landscape with quiet grandeur, and the film's meditation on memory, labor, and China's economic transformation is richly layered. However, the docufiction conceit, while novel, can make it difficult to invest emotionally in individual subjects, and the ending dissolves into an abstract, somewhat inconclusive register that leaves the cumulative portrait feeling unresolved rather than resonant.