Unknown Pleasures

A sympathetic, impressionistic portrait of youth so alienated that they’ve nothing to rebel against, much less for, Unknown Pleasures places the rebel-youth genre in the milieu of China’s “birth control generation,” coming of age in the new millennium. The television may be showing China’s Olympic bid, but unemployed buddies Xiao Ji and Bin Bin can’t see much future beyond their backwater northern mining town, where karaoke bars, pirated DVDs, random bombings, and a hot-wired singer (Zhao Tao) offer the only breaks from monotony. “As true a picture of contemporary existence as we could hope for now” (Kent Jones, Film Comment).