Cinema One Originals 2018 | Ash is Purest White

There's a scene in Ash is Purest White that lingers in the imagination. At the film's midpoint, the protagonist (Zhao Tao) is lured by the prospect of a different, quieter life, a life much more humdrum compared to the life of a jiang hu or gangster - the only life she has ever known. Ultimately, she declines this choice, unable to change. She sees UFOs in the clouds, and the connection makes a bit of sense: to the modern China she feels like an alien, watching over but unable to connect with the country metamorphosing in front of her.

Taking place over the course of seventeen years, Ash is Purest White is part crime drama, part semi-romance, part chronicle of a China undergoing rapid transformation. In the midst of all this are our protagonists, members of a small time gang operating in Shangxi. Soon it becomes clear as the world moves on that they are being left behind, and they are quickly becoming obsolete in a world that has no need for them.

This isn't the first time Jia Zhangke has tried to capture this feeling of change. His 2015 film Mountains May Depart also depicts a China in flux and the slow creep of Western civilization into Chinese culture. Jia is able to paint vivid pictures of contemporary China in the midst of one of its most profound transformations, acknowledging the transience of the moments in the film. In one scene we are treated to scenes of a riverside, while being made aware that these vistas will disappear after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. This sense of impermanence lasts all the way until the end of the film, where even in a place where the old ways stubbornly cling to relevance, things seemingly eternal, like love, fade into nothing.