Starring Tao Zhao and Taisheng Chen. Rated PG.

"See the world without ever leaving Beijing." So promises the slogan of Beijing's World Park, the inanimate star of the gloomy new film The World, from Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia (Unknown Pleasures).

Each day, thousands of (mainly Chinese) tourists flock to the gaudy, Disneyland-like premises to be shuttled on a blue monorail past scaled-down replicas of the great buildings of the world. A facsimile of the Arc de Triomphe sits near a 2/3-scale Eiffel Tower in the France sector, while Italy features an artificial but no-less-leaning Tower of Pisa. Across the pond (literally), a model of Manhattan features the curiously intact Twin Towers.

Reminiscent of a Las Vegas theme hotel, World Park has no casinos but plenty of tacky, ethnic-oriented shows performed in state- controlled uniformity. What happens in World Park generally stays in World Park, but over a languorous 139 minutes, we'll bear witness to the secrets and lies of a group of young park performers and security guards, each one of whom would desperately love to escape.

"Does anyone have a Band-Aid?" showgirl Tao Zhao (most of the main actors use their own names) asks during the long backstage tracking shot that opens the film. Indeed, throughout the course of the film, she and her wounded friends will seek a variety of Band-Aid solutions to the many troubled story lines that run through the film like power cables beneath the park. In addition to Tao's troubled romantic relationship with a park security officer named Taisheng, we soon discover Tao's fellow dancer Wei (Jue Jing) is having a hard time with her clinging, untrusting boyfriend, Niu (Zhong-wei Jiang). Elsewhere, Tao befriends a homesick Russian coworker and gets an unexpected visit from an ex-boyfriend while her current boyfriend's cousin, also a security guard, is arrested for thievery.

These soap-opera exploits, however, serve to flesh out the filmmaker's social commentary. Although The World is his first film to be officially "approved" by the Chinese film board, Jia challenges the state's tourist-friendly face, which-like the fake geishas of World Park's Japan-seems merely painted on. As Beijing prepares for the 2008 Olympics and concrete pours over much of the city, a global building site will soon become a global shopping mall. Omnipresent construction cranes dot the horizon, and in one heartbreaking scene, Taisheng's friend suffers an accident while putting in some evening overtime on a construction site. Beautifully shot and well-acted (yet, arguably, a tad too long), The World is a bleakly provocative and cinematically rewarding experience that, like World Park itself, visits upon many ideas without seeming to go anywhere at all.