A gangster’s wife stands on her own in Jia Zhangke’s expansive narrative of empowerment and survival, set against the tumultuous political and cultural changes of twenty-first-century China. Jia’s wife and longtime muse, Zhao Tao, whose roles in Unknown Pleasures and Still Life served as inspiration, stars as a woman saddled with a mobster lover who’s seen one too many John Woo films; she first protects him, and then learns to fend for herself, across twenty years of changes. “Beautifully unsettling, poetic and dazzling, simultaneously dark and radiant, Ash Is Purest White will surely count as one of Jia Zhangke’s greatest films” (Le Monde).