A look at the China that tourists never see

 Chinese director Jia Zhangke's debut film, Xiao Wu (1997) is a curiosity, worth watching today for its up-close look at everyday life in China in the late 20th century, a life and setting that American tourists never see, and for the sheer audacity of a film a crime and dissolution among China's youth - all on what must have been an extremely limited budget. All actors in the film were nonprofessionals, working out their characters and the milieu as the project progressed; apparently the film was shot entirely w/ 16mm handheld cameras, and it looks like it, too - though that adds the the sense of place. The story line such as it is in valves the eponymous Xiao Wu, a young man who makes a pretty good living as a pickpocket working the streets and shops in an industrial wasteland of a city on the distant outskirts of Beijing. He doesn't look like much of a thief or a threat - clean-cut, always wearing a red sweater, wonky thick eyeglasses. There's some pressure from family and friends pushing him to go straight and enter a dubious though maybe ominous business in wholesaling cigarettes. All of this is just a means to give us a portrayal of life in China, far from what the authorities or the tourist industry would have liked us to see - maybe that's still true: run-down building and apartments, projects left unfinished, terrible hygiene, prostitutes running a slick business, ineffective policing, everyone chasing money, and not a thought or a moment about China or ideology - although at the end there are hints of building a new urban China to welcome the annexation of Hong Kong.