JIA ZHANG-KE: XIAO WU/PICKPOCKET (1998)

The ur-Jia, now available, depicts an outdated young crook

I'm coming late to the party on this one, having written an admiring introduction to China's most famous "Sixth Generation" director a decade ago without having yet seen Xiao Wu, also known as Pickpocket, Jia's very first film. Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002) are known as Jia's "hometown trilogy." He branched out thereafter with Fengjie & The Three Gorges in his 2006 Still Life, Chengdu, Sichuan where modern housing is being constructed in 24 City (2008), and multiple locations thereafter. There is something special about Jia's first three films. They show a promise he perhaps has never lived up to through all his successes with the arthouse and festival publics. So it's good to finally get to see the first of the three and to envision all three as a kind of whole.

The titular character is a young pickpocket in Fenyang, Jia's hometown, where he set his early films. (Walter Salles' 2014 film about Jia Zhang-ke is called A Guy from Fenyang.) Xiao Wu is played by Jia’s childhood friend and collaborator Wang Hongwe. The setting is very documentary-style. The lead actor, while inexperienced, is not the person he's playing. The theme, true to Jia's subsequent work, comments on the country's economic miracle and its effect, often brutal, on the people of China. Xiao Wu is a loser, a criminal, obviuosy. But more to the point, he is out of date. His fellow former pickpocket, Jin Xiaoyong (Hao Hongjian), whom he confronts early on for not inviting him to his wedding, has taken advantage of the new economy's adaptability to exploitation, has dropped out-and-out criminality and instead making money off trading cigarettes and running karaoke bars. Xiao Wu is left embittered and unable to adapt. This time of rapid rising fortunes will leave him behind.

The reason why I did not talk about this film in my Jia essay is that then, it was hard to get a chance to watch it. I wasn't yet attending press screenings of New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center whose 1999 edition included it. Now (2026) it is being shown on the Criterion Channel with a restoration made in 2021, with the Janus Films holdling the rights. A physical Blu-ray and DVD should become available. A complete-up-to-now Jia collection should be in the works, and a "hometown trilogy" boxed set would be nice.

While studying film theory, Jia also developed an appreciation for European auteur filmmakers, such as Michelangelo Antonioni (Red Desert, 1964), Robert Bresson (A Man Escaped, 1956), and Vittorio de Sica (Umberto D., 1952). Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) was his own first film so this debut by Jia is sort of a homage. But it's not a slavish one, and is instead thoroughly rooted in contemporary China and what would be Jia's own style. And actually the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien was a major influence on Jia's early films. The recurrent pool-playing young men in Xiao Wu could have cdme right out of Hou Hsiao-hsien. At the end of this film an on screen line of text proclaims that the entire film was performed by non-professional actors. He could have said the locations were all authentic, because so many of them obviously are. Sometimes the street noise is striking, especially outside the bedroom of Xiao Wu's would be girlfriend.

The sequences of scenes, rather than monotonously documentary, is somewhat stream-of-consciousness at times. This shows in the sequence when our "hero" goes to visit his favorite karaoke hostess Meimei (Hongjian Hao) at home when she's called in sick and she asks him to sing, which he wouldn't before, at the karaoki bar. He still won't, insisting he can't. But then the film cuts to him in an empty public bath, stripping, walking through, and. . . singing, loudly. Next there is a scene of Xiao Wu and Meimei at the karaoke bar and this time they are both smiling and singing. The common thread is Xiao Wu and singing. It's not chronological or narrative logic. Using his so-very-rough and authentic material, Jia is painting with images and playing with time.

Of course many other things are going on and being by implication said in this film concerning the changing economy and Xiao Wu's misfit status. And yes, with his short stature, his neutral, presentable looks, his black frame glasses, his perpetual suit jackets, and his omnipresence in the film despite not doing very much, he does remind one of Woody Allen, except that Xiao Wu isn't witty and Woody wasn't a chain smoker. (One can't help wondering if Wang Hongwe was a chain smoker or if the constant lighting up with the lighter he stole from his comrade who's moved up that plays Für Elise and incessant little puffs constitute a key element of Wang's "acting".)

After that happy karaoke scene and one of group drunkenness with Xiao Wu participating (looks like real drinking), Xiao Wu buys a gold ring. It turns out Meimei has gone out on "assignment" with someone wealthy, from the provincial capital, Taiyuan, and when Xiao Wu goes to her former bedroom, she has left town and left no forwarding address. After her disappearance, Xiao Wu is more lost than ever. He has bought a gold ring. Who can he give it to? He gets beaten up and now has a paper stopper for a bloody nose. He attends a live opera where a girl is punished for attempting suicide.

Meimei had suggested Xiao Wu get a pager so she could tell him when she was free, but it's not till she's gone that he gets one. He shows it to his family members (dominated by his peasant farmer father) and they pass it around and look at this newfangled gadget. Though portable pagers had been in use in China since 1983, not for them. This useless status symbol will be his downfall. Meanwhile an argument over the gold ring he has now given to his mother leads to his father's banishing him from the family.

The beeper goes off when he is in the act of stealing and leads to Xiao Wu's pursuit and arrest.. A local cop who is a grandfather arraigns him as a crowd of kids ogle outside the window: it's like a bad dream more than any standard cop movie. But it's got wonderful irony. The chief turns on the TV so Xiao Wu can watch when he's handcuffed. It's broadcasting a promotion of urban development. He begs to look at his pager: all it has is a weather report: "Sunny, turning cloudy." Then later on the TV there's a report on a wide crackdown on petty offenders, and it comes: "Yesterday, the police arrested the recidivist Liang Xiao Wu. . ." And there are interviews: people he knows condemn him and say everyone is glad he's caught. The final images are of the public gathering to stare when Xiao Wu is handcuffed in a public place while the chief goes away. This punishment recalls American Colonial times when offenders were stockaded in a public square.

Sometimes Xiao Wu may feel at once both overly moralistic and too cozy. The provincial, underdeveloped nature of this world is very evident, so is the rush to judgment. But Jia's capture of the actual scene makes its exotic nature vivid. One of the joys of movies is being introduced into a world that is both very strange and very real. Jia Zhang-ke's Pickpocket does that for you, as his Platform and Unknown Pleasures in uniquely memorably ways for this century.

Xiao Wu, 110 mins., had its international premiere at the Berlinale Feb. 18, 1998, winning two awards. It had festival exposure also at Singapore, Vancouver, Pusan, Nantes, Göteborg , the aforementioned ND/NF, SFIFF, Taipei, and Belgrade. The restoration has been introduced at important venues recently.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.