I had been excited, for example, about Frenchmen Assayas’s Summer Hours and Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale. Yet both turned out to be distastefully tasteful— mere family portraits made watchable by impeccable lead performances (from Charles Berling, and from Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve, respectively). The scope of these dollhouse films is narrowly bourgeois, which is a particular frustration in the case of Assayas. Although Summer Hours has been called a return to form, I am still one of those people who finds Assayas’s recent low-budget gonzo experiments in globalism—demonlover (2002), Clean (2004) and this spring’s uneven but white hot Boarding Gate—to be his strongest work to date.

Like Assayas, Jia Zhang-ke is a victim of his own precedent. Still Life, Jia’s look at the luckless souls displaced by the Chinese government’s massive Yangtze River development, opened in American theaters in January, while Useless, his stream-of-consciousness documentary about the Chinese garment industry, was a highlight of last year’s NYFF. Jia has made a name for himself as an existential chronicler of the impoverished working class, and heretofore he has flown under Beijing’s radar by shooting independent productions that have no scripts and which classify, on technicalities, as documentaries. This has allowed him to circumvent China’s otherwise strict censorship laws. "First, you have to hand over your script. Then they go through your rushes, during the shooting,” Jia told a British newspaper in 2002. “I think if a film can pass such censorship, there can't be true characters in it."

The problem then with 24 City, Jia’s contribution to this year’s festival (along with a 19-minute short entitled Cry Me a River) is that it is the first movie he has made that was subject to official approval. An oral history of a Mao-era aerospace plant called Factory 420 that is in the process of being converted into luxury condos, 24 City mixes interviews of former workers with monologues by professional actors, including the director’s regular muse, Zhao Tao, and an unrecognizable Joan Chen (a.k.a Josie Packard). Jia’s cup may still runneth over with skepticism about the free market, but all the same 24 City exudes a discomforting nostalgia for Communist rule. The stories Jia’s characters tell are undeniably engrossing, but are these people, as the director himself put it, “true”?