Films as expansive as the brilliant Chinese feature The World defy easy summarization. But that won't stop its director from taking a shot. "If I had to summarize the story," says Jia Zhangke via telephone from Paris last week, "I'd say that it's a very true story that takes place against a fake background."

That fake background is the very real World Park, a sprawling entertainment complex erected on the outskirts of Beijing that houses miniature replicas of international landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Empire State Building. Every year, hordes of Chinese tourists flock to the park to marvel at the scale representations of the famous places they'll probably never visit. When they're not frolicking in the shade of the World Trade Center -- still standing on these manicured premises -- they're taking in garish outdoor shows, featuring "ethnic" dancing and costumes that make up in imaginative pizzazz what they lack in authenticity.

Though it is shot on location, The World is not a documentary. It's a drama that traces the intertwining lives of several park employees. They include the gorgeous, bratty dancer Zhao Tao (also her real name), whose tentative romance with a security guard (Chen Taisheng) provides a sort of narrative anchor. Although it's acted and directed naturalistically -- the exception being some flash-animated sequences representing cellphone text messages -- The World's plot is quite intricately woven: Jia's assertion that he has made a "very true story" has to do with the work's allegorical heft. He's hesitant to say he's made an overtly political film but he acknowledges that the subtext is pointed in the direction of a critique. "In China," he says, "people have a real desire to know more about the world. So the park is like a door for them. But it's no more real than Disneyland is for Americans. It's sad to see people go there and know that what they're seeing isn't the real thing."

This notion of a cruel pop-culture oasis is carried over from the 35-year-old filmmaker's previous features, which will be screening along with The World in Cinematheque Ontario's inaugural Film Now Program (March 18-27, including an appearance by the director at the screening on the 18th).

Both 2000's Platform () and 2003's Unknown Pleasures () are films about the illusions of youth. More specifically, they let us see how China's youth culture has been bombarded in the years since the Cultural Revolution with unrequited promises of fulfillment from without: pop idols, movie stars, fashion mavens. So far, his films have centred on rootless adolescents and tortured twentysomethings whose naïve attempts at interface -- through art or acting out -- are met with indifference by the surrounding society, resulting in dangerously high levels of ennui. The culprit, hypothesizes Jia, is modernization itself. "I am interested in the dialectic relationship between what is true and what is fake in China. For young people, the difficult questions they have -- about life, love and existence -- are the truth. But these questions get buried beneath material things."

For all the international acclaim afforded his work -- the Village Voice recently proclaimed him "the world's greatest living filmmaker under 40" -- Jia remains something of an enfant terrible at home. He isn't shy to criticize his contemporaries, including Hero auteur Zhang Yimou, for retreating into the same empty spectacle that The World so fervently denounces. Jia's uncompromising approach has caused some problems: neither Platform nor Unknown Pleasures was OK'd by the Chinese censor boards, and were thus denied above-ground distribution status in his home country. His script for The World was approved but obviously the trappings of legitimacy, which include greater financial and technical freedom, haven't dulled his edge.

In fact, The World may be his most lucid work to date. Jia takes aim not only at the implications of the park -- as the planet's largest free-standing metaphor for globalization, it's a pretty fat target -- but at the recent deluge of "personalized" technology, exemplified in the film by the characters' constant use of digital text messaging.

"This phenomenon is even more present in China than in other parts of the world," Jia says. "Superficially, this technology allows people to stay connected but really, it fosters an even worse sense of solitude and loneliness. People can't express themselves face to face: they do it in text messages."

The animated sequences depicting these forlorn digital exchanges are another first for the director: following the stark realism of Platform and Unknown Pleasures, they constitute an unexpected but sensationally effective stylistic departure. "We're submerged in digital things. Mobile phones, portable computers. I think of [The World] as a digital film, even though it was not shot on digital video. I chose to incorporate digital into the narration of the story, so sometimes it's like you're going through a page, or going through a link."

The balancing act between didacticism and effective storytelling is a difficult one but for all its overweening ambition, The World feels perfectly proportioned. Jia's trademark empathy for his disaffected protagonists is present but it never crosses the line into condescension: he feels for them without clumsily forcing our emotions. This delicate austerity speaks to Jia's admiration of such filmmakers as Antonioni and Bresson but given his film's wariness of encroaching Westernization, it's unsurprising that he redirects the conversation towards his own national artistic context, his own responsibilities, and what he hopefully sees as a new opening for like-minded filmmakers interested in working the system from the inside.

"In China, there are many frustrations to be overcome but this film seems to have lifted through them," Jia says. "This is because the censor system has changed a lot, even since last year. There seem to be fewer problems. But I will keep a careful eye on this progress. I will continue to observe."