China, early 2000s. By following the love story of his longtime heroine, Zhao Tao, Jia ZhangKe delivers a unique epic that spans all his films and more than 20 years of the history of a country in the throes of change.
There’s no better place than Cannes to create a discussion between the films in the same selection, to open up the interplay of links and dissonances in an attempt to perceive the major trends of this years’s edition, to grasp what they tell us about the world, the times and cinema. The presence in competition of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and of Caught by the Tides has led us to bring them both into dialogue. Gigantic projects undertaken for almost forty years by the 85-year-old American filmmaker, and for over twenty years by the 53-year-old Chinese director, the two films have in common a long phase of elaboration. But whereas Megalopolis, in the midst of its maze of issues and manifold plots, also tells us the story of a man and a filmmaker who would like to freeze time, with unbelievable excesses of form that are as jubilant as they are asphyxiating, Caught by the Tides, Feng Liu Yi Dai in its original title, which means « generation adrift » but can also be understood as « wind and wave », lets it flow infinitely. Initiated in the early 2000s in the city of Datong, in the filmmaker’s native Shanxi province, Caught by the Tides brings together two decades of footage shot in the area.
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Mostly documentary images, amidst which live anonymous, laughing women pouring out their love lives via karaoke songs, pensive men no doubt waiting for the afternoon shift to resume, teenagers ready for a fight. Amidst them, Qiaoqiao and Bin, central characters in the director’s work since Unknown Pleasures (2002), played by the equally faithful Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin, are a loving couple soon separated by the man’s departure, called away by the promise of the future. A sumptuous film, embracing many of the motifs at work in Jia Zhangke’s filmography, which is entirely devoted to the study of China in its minutest folds, Caught by the Tides is especially so in the way it adds up scattered, heterogeneous regimes of images, sometimes giving the impression of having been shot with a small, limited-performance DV camera, sometimes rediscovering the stylized, implacable, film noir-like mannerism of A Touch of Sin. Finally, the film explores their more sophisticated side, using the latest, expert technologies in shots that seem to be controlled by a mechanical and panoptic eye.
Caught by the Tides seems to be everything at once: a documentary, a melodrama, a musical and an epic, genres that collide like atoms, producing meaning and emotion. A mutant film, Caught by the Tides is entirely capable of capturing the transformations of a society, its elusive movements, exhuming the ruins of its past in scenes of constructions sites that seem as if they were taken from a Fassbinder film, and revealing its future potentialities in a scene of recognition between a robot and a woman. Some sense of an abstract plenitude emanates from Caught by the Tides, a generous radicalness, bursting with inventiveness and formal prowess, including long, slow panorama shots reminiscent of Akerman and Michael Snow. From this abundant experimentation and heartbreaking love story, a unique language emerges in a film that readily dispenses with words, trusting only those that irrigate the songs. Documenting with as much intuition the turmoil of Chinese society and its invisible members as those of an ever-expanding technological universe, Caught by the Tides responds to the fear of a world deprived of its humanity, with a work entirely dedicated to said humanity, to its smallest manifestations, to the wind and waves that traverse a landscape, to the tremors that cross the gaze of a sad heroine, heart beyond repair and face obstructed by a surgical mask, as if impervious to time – a gaze in which time nonetheless seems to run.
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