Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) experiences romance and sorrow Taken by the tides.
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Janus movies
During the pandemic, Chinese director Jia Zhangke, like many of us, had a lot of time in her hands. He began to sift through a personal archive made up of sequences he had shot since 2001. He ended up weaving a large part of these images – some of which we have seen before – in a magnificent and lyrical characteristic, called Taken by the tides.
We are used to seeing archive material in documentaries, but this film is something much rarer and more foreign: it is an archive drama – a whole story composed of two decades of cast alikes.
The film uses this unknown method to tell a familiar Jia story, on a passionate and difficult woman, played by the great Zhao Tao, the frequent collaborator of the director and his off screen. Over several years, this character, whose name is Qiaoqiao, experiences romance and sorrow and finds himself drift, traveling a Chinese landscape of the 21st century which is forever in flow. This flow has become the great subject of JIA’s career; He is deeply listening to the winds of social, economic, political, technological and even geographic changes that sweep his country.
Taken by the tides takes place in three acts. The first takes place in Datong, a city in northern China. Jia fans will recognize scenes from Unknown pleasuresIts 2002 drama on young people aimed in a city where the local coal industry is declining and capitalism is increasing.
Qiaoqiao is a young dancer who entertains in bars and clubs, as well as promotional events for an alcohol brand. Whenever she dances, Jia unleashes a torrent of music, the most infectiously with the 1998 tube “Butterfly”, from the Swedish pop group Smile.dk.
Jia has always used music alive in his films, and in Taken by the tidesHe joins so many scenes of free and dancing free people that the film plays almost as a full -fledged musical. It is in tatters and disorienting, but it is the point; The future and even the present seem almost bursting as a possibility.
It was at this time that Qiaoqiao fell in love with a local gangster named Bin, played by actor Li Zhubin. But their romance quickly becomes sour and the two separated, which opens the way to the second more melancholy act of the film.
Qiaoqiao heads south, sailing on the Yangtze river and looking for bins; He resurfaces at some point, but what they had in the past is now lost forever. Meanwhile, we are witnessing the human balance sheet failure of the Tree Gorges Dam project, which led to mass movement and the demolition of houses in the region.
Jia has a strange capacity to capture the overview with the little ones, to move from an intimate drama and focused on the characters to a larger and larger drama. With each change of perspective, we remember that each person uprooted here has a story to tell.
A large part of the images of the second act came from Jia’s film in 2008, Still life, and its 2019 drama, The ash is the purest white. More than a decade separates these two films, and Jia does not bother to hide the seams as he rocks between them.
One of the most captivating things on Taken by the tides is that images and formats change over time, the stock of grainy films and the digital video of low grade from the start to a smoother HD video and even some virtual reality images in the subsequent sections. Jia showed us before the transformation of China and the larger world; Here, he shows us that the movement support itself evolves continuously.
In the third act, Qiaoqiao briefly meets in Datong with Bin, who is now visibly aged. This section was shot in 2022, under very styled protocols, and Jia uses it to capture a current mood of alienation: it shows us influencers that pull their tiktoks and their friendly robots wandering in the aisles of the grocery stores.
But Jia never loses sight of our heroine, nor the extraordinary actor playing her. Throughout the film, Zhao Tao never says a word – a daring choice that may have facilitated the director to shape a story out of the raw material. Zhao does not need the dialogue; She has the emotional brilliance and eloquence of a silent film star.
At the end of Taken by the tidesQiaoqiao no longer dances; She jogs at night with several other women and men. The scene plays like a tribute from Jia Zhangke to her colleagues Chinese citizens – a deeply moving point of everything they have endured that holds hope when they courageously run in the future.
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