CIFF: 24 City, Of Time and the City

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 19, 2008 5:06PM

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival.

24 City (screens 10/19 and 10/23)
When the movie begins, you think you're watching an ordinary documentary about Factory 420, an enormous factory which produced aeronautic and military components for decades. Now the land upon which it sits in the city center has become so valuable that the entire factory is being dismantled to make way for 24 City, a giant complex containing an industrial park and five-star hotel. The movie alternates between interviews with long-time factory workers and beautifully-composed images of the decrepit factory in its final days. About an hour in, Joan Chen (The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks) shows up onscreen as one of the factory workers; and you suddenly realize that you haven't been watching an ordinary documentary at all. Were all of the interviewees actually actors? Were they performing words taken from interviews with actual factory workers, or have you only been hearing skillfully-written monologues? That ambiguity, in a film coming out of Communist China, is fairly subversive. One of the final interviews is with a young woman who has a job as a personal shopper, going to Hong Kong every two weeks to buy things for rich ladies who "have a taste for fashion but not the energy." Director Jia Zhang-ke's point is clear: the "comradeship and solidarity" of the old ways are being replaced by the selfish and materialistic ways of the new generation. 24 City is a fascinating look at a culture in transition.

Of Time and the City (screens 10/23)
Terence Davies wrote, directed and narrates this elegiac history of growing up in Liverpool, spanning the 50's to the present. It's made up of vintage archival material mixed with newer location footage. "We love the place we hate, and we hate the place we love," he says early in the movie. Like Guy Maddin in My Winnipeg he seems both nostalgic and bitter about his hometown, creating some vivid juxtapositions, such as when a montage of gutted buildings and rubble-filled lots is accompanied by Peggy Lee lushly crooning "The Folks Who Live on the Hill." As in some of his other movies, Davies contrasts the hard-scrabble working class character of Liverpool with the fantasy world of escapism embodied by the occasional summertime seaside holiday and Hollywood movies. He rhapsodizes over Gregory Peck and Dirk Bogarde, connecting his adolescent fascination with his realization of being gay. His narration, blending slightly overripe stream-of-conscious remembrances with quotes from the likes of James Joyce and Engels, is like listening to a grumpy intellectual grandfather. The wisdom and feeling buried beneath the sarcastic sourness is somehow oddly endearing. When he gripes about The Beatles and rock & roll displacing the smoothness of pop you're almost ready to agree with him.