Platforms Don't Go Anywhere; Neither Does This Movie

Jia Zhangke's Platform is something of a coming of age story. It chronicles the lives of a group of young boys and girls who have formed a song and dance troupe. Starting in 1980, the movie follows them up through the 90s, as they experience a transitional time for both themselves, as the become adults, and China, as it deals with its transition away from Maoist ideology. While this sounds like it would make for an engaging picture, Platform is anything but.

The story and plot are simply to sparse to support the films nearly 3 hour length. Time passes with no real consequence or change, save for the superficial changes of clothes and hairstyles as the characters get older. The only real plot point of interest that stands out from the monotony is the groups trip to a mining town, where it seems like something interesting might happen, but nothing ever materializes, and the story once more transports the characters back to their dreary home town. While the characters themselves engage in gossip and drama, none of this ever seems to have any effect on anything.

The lack of deep character drama is another flaw of the film. While it certainly is an ensemble cast, which can often lead to less individual development, that is no excuse of the complete lack of character development. The characters are introduced via a roll call of names, which makes it hard to pair a face to the who is who amongst the cast, and you quickly lose track of which character is which. As a result of this, much of their drama loses any impact it might have had, as you have no idea who is being gossiped about. The characters also never really develop at all, never giving the audience a reason to care for them, or indeed, to feel any emotion at all towards them. They remain, like everything else, in a sort of stasis, only changing superficially. The lack of character development and and tendency to lose track of characters is certainly not helped by the camera work, focused on the characters as often as it did not.

Throughout the movie, the camera would often wander from the characters, focusing on the objects around them, which proved quite distracting or disconcerting. In outdoor sequences, the camera would often see the entire panorama of the scenery, with the characters themselves reduced to mere ants on the backdrop. While artistically beautiful, it detracted from the experience, as more often than not, the characters would be engaged in dialogue, making it next to impossible to determine who was saying what to whom. The camera work seemed to be more interested in the landscape and scenery of the surroundings than on the characters themselves. This only added to the sense of monotony, as the camera would focus on the landscape for minutes at a time, further breaking up an already sparse story.

While symbolism abounds throughout the film, it often gets derailed by the sheer length of the film, or oddities of the camera work. For example; there is one scene where Cui Minliang and his girlfriend are talking, and they keep alternating places. The way the camera is positioned, an old fortress wall is being focused on, so one of the two is always blocked by the wall. One could argue that this is symbolic of China being caught up in a struggle between its past and future, but while watching the scene, it felt silly and absurd.

Much of the point of the film, dealing with the superficial changes brought by the end of the Maoist era, could have been created in a film that was far less pointlessly lengthy. Due to this, I cannot recommend this film to anyone, unless perhaps they are diehard followers of Chinese cinema. Jia Zhangke started the film on a worthy premise, but simply let it drag on to long for the premise to have any real meaning by the films conclusion.