In the Dark: Movie Reviews with Kirk Boxleitner

‘Ash Is Purest White’ sets doomed love affair in Chinese criminal underworld

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Much like Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War” did in 2018, writer-director Jia Zhangke’s “Ash Is Purest White” presents a portrait of a toxic love affair spanning multiple decades, whose presentation is enlivened by a cool, atmospheric style and a background exploration of the zeitgeist and culture that surrounds our doomed couple.

Unlike “Cold War,” which lived up to its title by setting its story in Europe during the 1940s through the 1960s, “Ash Is Purest White” is set in industrial northern China from 2001 to 2018, but this merely underscores how personal each story is for its filmmaker, since Pawlikowski based the dysfunctional romance in “Cold War” on his parents, while Jia again casts his wife, Zhao Tao, as his leading lady.

Zhao plays Qiao, the kept woman of a street-level mob boss named Bin, played by Liao Fan. While Bin runs a popular nightclub and bustling backroom mahjong games, Qiao looks after her father, in the old mining city of Datong, who’s been laid off since the price of coal has dropped.

While Bin and Qiao are able to spend their nights dancing to club music, and Bin is well-respected enough by his peers that random gangsters light his cigarettes for him without being asked, they both sense trouble on the horizon when a fellow local mob boss is killed in a random attack by punk kids who apparently didn’t even know his status as a gangster.

Qiao suggests to Bin that he leave the criminal underworld and run away with her, but he instead hands her his gun for protection. This comes back to haunt them when a motorcycle gang surrounds Bin one night, with the intent of unseating him from power, and Qiao fires his gun to prevent Bin from being beaten to death.

Jia’s exploration of his native China turns downright Dickensian when Qiao refuses to confess that the gun belongs to Bin, and she’s sentenced to five years in prison, while he only serves one year. To add insult to injury, during Qiao’s incarceration, Bin has left the underworld, just as she suggested, and started dating a new girlfriend, a mutual acquaintance of his and Qiao’s from before they were imprisoned.

Qiao only learns of Bin’s betrayals after being released from prison and making an ill-fated ferry trip to the Hubei province, where he now lives. Along the way, Qiao has her ID and money stolen by a con artist, and is propositioned for sex by the moped taxi driver whom she asks to drive her to the power plant where Bin now works.

What’s ultimately revealed about Qiao and Bin is how codependent they are, due to their inability to combat their own natures. While Bin wields the charisma of low-level criminal power at first, and is a formidable hand-to-hand fighter, he’s weak when it comes to emotional confrontations, hiding from Qiao until she forces him to see her again.

And just as Bin is a habitual taker and user of other people, Qiao cannot stop herself from caring about Bin’s welfare for too long, even though she’s an instinctive survivor without him. To get by after being stolen from, Qiao quickly develops some cons of her own, and even steals the moped of the man who propositions her.

Before she’s imprisoned, Qiao muses how the purity of volcanic ash comes from the temperatures that produce it, and like that ash, Qiao is burned by the very same crucible that reveals her strength.

Jia’s China is one inhabited by either predators or prey, with no real in-betweens, so when Qiao returns to Datong and becomes the boss of Bin’s old criminal enterprises, it’s depicted as a sign of her strength. And yet, when Bin shows up, asking her to take him in after his fortunes have taken a turn for the worse, she can’t resist putting him up in her place, even as she insists she feels nothing for him anymore.

Compared to “Cold War” which had the wisdom to keep its tale tight at 89 minutes, “Ash Is Purest White” extends over a relatively sprawling 136 minutes, but its meditative showcasing of the Chinese countryside and its cities in decline lingered with me after I left the theater.