The platform of the film’s title (the same title in Chinese as in English) refers to a pop song about a group of people waiting for a train to arrive. Yet it’s also the platform of a stage, where our characters, a roving acting troupe, put on a variety of shows over the years. Notably, we first meet our characters performing a Cultural Revolution-era play entitled “Train Heading for Shaoshan.” Later, the characters listening to the song “Platform” are interrupted by a real train, which they gleefully chase after. The train, an image of China’s relentless economic growth, passes by, leaving our characters in its wake. They remain on the platform (or stage), left to imitate the train going to Shaoshan, acting out the promise of prosperity and fulfillment that will never come.

Platform is Jia’s most formally austere film (certainly where he gets his rep for being Antonioni-esque). His characters are dwarfed in every scene they are in, either by the ancient, crumbling walls of their hometown of Fenyang which dominate the film’s framing, or the vast stretches of quarries, mountains, deserts where the dwindling troupe travels. The corresponding smallness of these characters against these vast stretches emphasizes their lack of agency, their passivity in the face of sweeping economic and cultural change in post-Mao China. Jia further stylistically underscores this sense of disempowerment through his precise long shots, either static or pivoting with an all-seeing steadiness, reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-Hsien or Tsai Ming-liang. Jia’s rigid framing, his lack of camera movements, gives Platform a stage-like presentation, situating its characters once more on a platform, acting out history’s script in which they have no say.

Neither nostalgic for the failures and broken promises of China’s Maoist past nor an anti-nostalgic embrace of the Dengist reforms of the 80s, Platform is a delicately controlled combination of motion and stillness: the world around the characters changing at a rapid pace while the characters feel stuck, bypassed, left behind by this promise of progress. But as pessimistic as Jia can sometimes be, he is no determinist, which is why Platform ends with a kettle reaching its boiling point: history never stops, the train eventually arrives at its destination.