OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
It is a spirit of recapitulation, even of rehashing, which hovers over Caught by the Tides, the latest feature film by Jia Zhang-ke, a regular in the Cannes competition, once again in the running for the Palme d’Or. The filmmaker, a major voice of Chinese modernity in the 2000s, known for having filmed the country’s profound changes live, seems to have felt for several films the need to tirelessly revisit his cinema, to rediscover the places, the faces, the patterns, time markers.
With Beyond the mountains (2015), then The Eternals (2018), he has made a habit of telling, since the turn of the millennium, the recent history of China in three stages, which are also three ages of his characters. Caught by the Tides does exactly the same thing, but this time using archive footage, existing material that Jia Zhang-ke has accumulated over twenty-three years of filming. Only the last part, connecting with China of Covid-19, was the subject of entirely new takes.
The story, too, follows the same Antonionian path already traced many times by Jia Zhang-ke. In 2001, in Datong (where were filmed Unknown pleasures in 2002, then THE Eternals), a mining town in northern China where the last traces of the old working-class culture survive, a young woman, Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao, the filmmaker’s favorite actress and companion), falls in love with a boy, Bin (Li Zhubin) , who disappears to go to work in the South.
In 2006, she went looking for her in the Hubei region where the Three Gorges Dam was being built (already filmed in Still Lifein 2006, and The Eternals), flagship of a policy of major works, and its wandering is imbued with the profound restructuring of the Chinese landscape, like the lives which are turned upside down. In 2022, now crippled, limping with the help of a cane, Bin returns to Datong without a job and in desperation. At the checkout of a supermarket, he recognizes Qiaoqiao under her respiratory mask. Both have aged, their lives have passed elsewhere.
Changing landscapes
This story replayed like an old standard initially raises fears of a sort of treading water on the part of the filmmaker, at best a stutter. But its treatment by the archive brings about a radical downsizing. The film, very fragmentary, assembles a patchwork of images of very varying qualities, from different eras. Strictly documentary passages (a group of workers taking turns singing the song) are mixed with “cuts” (unused takes) from previous fictions, such as Unknown pleasureswhere we recognize a young Zhao Tao wearing an iconic wig.
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