Cannes 2024 – an old Godard-esque dream

Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s newest film, was born out of images. For the past 20-25 years, the Chinese filmmaker (Still Life, A Touch of Sin, etc.), whenever he travels, films what he sees with a small digital camera. A bit like taking notes. Sometimes, he explains, he brings his wife and favorite actress, the fantastic Zao Tao, into the shot. Jia had never looked at these images, but he kept them. Then, during the lockdown caused by the Cocid 19 pandemic, because he couldn’t do much, he looked at these rushes, these documentary images – which miraculously become fiction, as if by transubstantiation, as soon as an actress slips into them – remember Ingrid Bergman with Rossellini. Jia began editing them, and thus was Caught by the Tides born, even before any script, any « story », which was itself born of this editing.

            {"type":"Pave-Haut2-Desktop"}
          

As for Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Arabian Nights, etc.), even before writing anything, he had an idea: with the agreement of his new producer – whom he has nothing but praise for – he traveled to several Asian countries (Thailand, Japan, China, etc.) with some of his collaborators, and took images, constituting a data bank, “archives », which he also edited upon returning to his country, Portugal. He then wrote a screenplay with his screenwriters, inspired by the memory of this trip, based on these documentary images. Here too, the screenplay grew out of the images, rather than the other way around, as is still traditional in most filmmaking. Only then did he shoot the fictional part, entirely in a studio, and mixed it with his documentary stocks. Here again, a highly original gesture and a film, Grand Tour, that is no less original. The film’s action is supposed to take place in 1918, yet the inhabitants of these countries wear T-shirts and ride motorcycles? No matter, the viewer doesn’t even care, because he’s signed a pact of trust with the artist: if you tell him it’s 1918, it’s 1918.

Yesterday, I was interviewing the young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, whose beautiful first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, is also part of the official competition. In the course of our conversation, she explained that during her film studies, she had written a thesis on Miguel Gomes and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, both of whom she greatly admires. I told her that Gomes and Jia – whose work she also loves – had struck again, and explained the method they had used this time. Her eyes began to sparkle. She was amazed. I think the cinema of the future still has some great films in store for us.