here’s a very strong argument to be made that Asia is to current cinema what Europe has traditionally been in decades past–the proverbial mecca for groundbreaking, boundary-pushing, genuinely innovative filmmaking. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang, to name just a few, have, over the course of the last decade-plus, created bodies of work comparable to those of Bergman, Bresson, Antonioni, and Fellini (to say nothing of Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, perhaps the greatest filmmaker working in the world today, nor of Godard, who still remains well ahead of the curve).

I mention these old masters not merely as a validation of their contemporary counterparts, but also as evidence that cinema as a relevant art form is as alive and kicking as ever, despite the best (or rather, worst) efforts of the Jerry Bruckheimers and Michael Bays stinking things up back in Hollywood. The oeuvres of directors like Hou and Wong are, naturally, radically different from those of Bresson and Antonioni. What’s important is that they’re no less radical than their predecessors in their unfailing knack for formal invention; they’re consistently offering up films largely unlike anything we’ve ever encountered in the past.

32 year-old Jia Zhangke has been touted as Chinese cinema’s latest visionary. His first two features, 1997's Xiao Wu (aka Pickpocket) and 2000's Platform never received proper theatrical distribution in the United States, but generated staggering critical notices based on the strength of their various festival screenings. His third feature, Unknown Pleasures, was thankfully picked up by New Yorker Films and has received a very limited U.S. release (which, I supposed, is certainly better than none at all). At its most conventional level, a penetrating study of the aimlessness in youth brought about by stifling urban boredom and the consequent idea of romance as a means to uproot that monotony, Unknown Pleasures easily justifies the mountains of superlatives that have been heaped on Jia these past several years.

This summer I interviewed Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and about "Our Time," her band’s signature anthem, she said, "[It was written for] the younger generation of kids who seem lost and kind of goalless" and that it was intended as "a rally song for kids without anything to rally for." Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) and Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong), Jia’s protagonists in Unknown Pleasures, fit that bill to a tee. They seem to float obliviously (but not blissfully) through their lives, unfocused, disaffected, and utterly numb to their surroundings. The only things that seem to provoke any interest at all in them are movies (such as Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Xiao Ji’s fascination with which leads to awful results for his friend), pop music (the film’s Chinese title, which translates as "Free of All Constraints," comes from an Asian pop hit), and, of course, girls.

Just like teenage males living anywhere else in the world, Bin Bin and Xiao Ji face considerable problems in that last department. Bin Bin’s girlfriend is an ambitious student planning on studying business at a university. He, on the other hand, doesn’t plan on doing much of anything aside from half-heartedly attempting to join the army, which ends up rejecting him anyway. Though they make plans to keep in touch, Jia suggests through the underlying sadness in his characters that their relationship is most likely doomed.

Xiao Ji sets his sights on Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), an aspiring actress working as a dancer at promotional events for Mongolian King Liquor. She’s outwardly tough and determined, intimidating the feckless Xiao Ji. However, her prospects prove ultimately as hopeless as those of Xiao Ji and Bin Bin, as she eventually turns to prostitution in order to make ends meet. In one extremely awkward scene, Xiao Ji finds himself alone in a car with Qiao Qiao and is unable to do anything aside from recite a hokey pick-up line, which she promptly shoots down by informing him that she recently had an abortion. Unknown Pleasures particularly in the scenes between Xiao Ji and Qiao Qiao, perfectly captures both the seeming impossibility of real human connection in today’s world and our tendency to elevate onto a golden pedestal those people with whom we become romantically infatuated, only to be crushed as our idealized perceptions fail to live up to harsh reality.

On a more global level, the film also serves as a telling examination of the lose-lose nature of social systems that inevitably set people up to fail. Most interestingly, Jia addresses the role that Westernization has played (suggesting another world just beyond reach) in the current state of a city like Datong, an urban wasteland that might well serve as a microcosm for much of the rest of Asia. The idea that its denizens seem to have no future awaiting them and, really, not even much of a present to live for, consequently, feels depressingly natural.

Yu Lik-wai, who served as cinematographer for Jia’s previous two features, shot Unknown Pleasures using digital video. His camera work brings to the film a startling immediacy without sacrificing some of the most formally exquisite compositions I’ve seen on screen in years. (In fact, aside from the technical miracle that is Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Yu puts DV to the best use I’ve seen to date.) Like Hou, Jia favors long real-time single-takes, and Yu’s DV only adds to the documentary-like impact of such scenes. The most stunning example of this is the film’s finale, in which Bin Bin is forced at gunpoint to sing for a policeman. The scene is so quietly desperate and deeply unsettling that it will continue to haunt your memory long after the credits roll and you’ve left the theatre.

This is unmistakably the work of a young director destined to be one of his generation’s defining cinematic figures. Unknown Pleasures is the best film of the year.