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The guides at Beijing's World Park promise "a new world every day," but over the course of Jia Zhang-ke's dazzling fourth feature, that come-on starts to seem less enticing than ominous. In the World Park, a popular tourist attraction whose appeal Jia neatly subverts, each nation is represented by replicas of its famous landmarks. There's a scaled-down Eiffel Tower, a baby Sphinx, even a miniature Manhattan, its gleaming spires safely contained by an encircling moat. Enabling visitors to "see the world without ever leaving Beijing," the park offers the illusion of mobility while actually denying it. Even the monorail that speeds from one attraction to the next runs, finally, in a circle.

Although he's occasionally seduced by the World Park's impressive surfaces, Jia starts The World behind the scenes. In the first of the movie's many long takes, the camera follows Tao (Zhao Tao), a brashly naive dancer attired as an Indian princess, through a warren of backstage corridors as she belts, "Band-Aid! Anybody got a Band-Aid?" Moments later, the stage explodes in a burst of yellow light which threatens to dissolve the performers in its glare. This spectacle may be alluring—especially as captured by Nelson Yu Lik-Wai's dazzling hi-def video—but it's a dangerous business.

Jia's first three features, Xiao Wu, Platform and Unknown Pleasures, effectively chronicled the dissolution of the state-run economy in his rural hometown of Fenyang. But if the 35-year-old Jia is no apologist for the past—The World is his first movie made within the state system, and thus the first that can legally be exhibited in China—he casts a cool eye on the new China as well. As a character in Xiao Wu laments, "The old is being pulled down, but I see nothing new."

Significantly, The World rarely ventures into Beijing itself. Jia may have moved out of the provinces, but he's not quite ready for the big city. Outside of the park, we see mainly cramped interiors: dingy sweatshops, sleazy karaoke bars and a construction site whose skeletal pillars recall the forbidding landscape of Antonioni's L'Eclisse. But where Antonioni's characters are pinned to their carefully framed backdrops, Jia lets his creations roam free. Impressive but unforbidding, his wide-angle shots take in a universe of barely contained detail, often drifting sideways to catch an action already in progress. Despite the omniscience promised by the wired world (and, more subtly, threatened by the Chinese government's surveillance ), life goes on, whether we're watching or not.

In fact, although The World aches with modernist alienation, Jia pauses to wonder whether the infinite connectedness of the Internet era is really such a good thing. Tao's co-worker Niu (Jian Zhong-wei) flips out every time he can't reach his girlfriend on her cell, and threatens to buy her a GPS phone so he can track her at all times. The text messages from Tao's boyfriend, Taisheng (Chen Taisheng), may send her into flash-animated frenzy (the most notable upgrade in production value from Jia's previous films), but their in-person encounters take place in dingy hotel rooms lit by single, poison-yellow bulbs.

The movie's most profound relationship is almost wordless. Anna (Alla Shcherbakova), a Russian mother of two, arrives at the park accompanied by three countrywomen and a seedy handler who establishes his nastiness by asking for their passports—a prized possession most Chinese can only dream of owning. Despite their lack of common language, Anna and Tao establish a tentative friendship, although their doubly subtitled conversations give the audience special insight into how much slips through the cracks. When the sweater around Anna's shoulder drops to reveal the angry welts on her back and Tao gently replaces it, no words can convey the understanding that passes between the two of them—and no words do.

Despite their fragile understanding, Tao mistakes her new friend's mobility for liberty. "I envy you," she says. "You can go anywhere. What freedom!" And, in fact, Anna does escape, though not before sinking considerably lower. The World's other citizens aren't so lucky. Although Jia's roving camera and the overlapping sound which bridges most scenes suggest the extent to which their stories are inevitably intermingled, they remain resolutely isolated from one another, the distance between them only accentuated by the devices that are meant to connect them. In fact, the movie's abrupt (and, even after three viewings, rather unsatisfying) ending suggests that the only real communion comes after they leave their bodies behind—either a profoundly pessimistic comment on the state of the physical world or a veiled satire on the promise of virtuality. At once sprawling and intimately observed, The World is big enough to contain both ideas, and many more besides.

(sam@citypaper.net)

The World

Written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke A Zeitgeist release Fri.-Sat., Jan. 27-28, International House