Review of The World (2004) by Jerry W — 03 Mar 2006

[b]The World[/b], Jia[indent]One of the things that made Lost In Translation so effective was that it was able to capture the hopelessness of loneliness . Its characters bump into each other and share a respite from their respective loveless lives. But for Coppola's movie, intimacy, happiness, love are fleeting notions and even when we think we have them in grasp, they're slipping away. The World is interested in a similar loneliness as its characters travel through life looking for meaningful connections and finding only people they can tolerate.

The main character, Tao, works at a theme park in Beijing with scaled down versions of all the world's great tourist attractions. It's slogan is something to the effect of "see the world without leaving Beijing." This fascimile of travel (walking around the park is like traveling the world) is the film's main metaphor. Tao's search for love is more like a facsimilie of a search and what she and others are able to achieve is like taking a ride on the one-third scale Eiffel Tower: it may be fun, but it's not the real thing. But that's not it. Most of the people who take a ride on the fake haven't been on the real thing so for them the notion of real and fake is a luxury they don't have to worry about. All they have are models of the great pyramids, all they have are marriages of convenience.

To further justify my comparison of this to Lost In Translation there is one relationship in the movie which is very similar to that between Johansson and Murray. When a group of Russians come to work at the theme park, Tao becomes close with one in particular, Anna. Tao speaks no Russian; Anna speaks no Chinese (Mandarin?); yet they meet and become fast friends. Each one seems to be able to sense the loneliness in the other and just being together is meaningful. But Anna has to move on and they part. When they run into each other again, they have nothing they can say, but they each weep.

This sounds really pathetic because it is. The way this avoids sappiness is by making the audience believe the despair that brings them to tears. Beijing is shown to be a big impersonal city filled with impersonal people. When people meet childhood friends, you see glimmers of the familiarity they lost by coming to the city for jobs.

Beautifully sad movie.

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