The Odyssey of Jia Zhangke in 21st century China is mainly shot during the production of other films. The result is amazing.
Photo: Sideshow / Janus movies
The man tells the woman he leaves. The woman is exhausted in tears. Although neither of them speaks a word, we have read his message in a title card: “I want to leave and try outside. Once I am installed, I will come and get you.” A train withdrew from the station, heading south with him. The woman remains alone in their dusty and arid hometown, smokes and will work, singing on stage for an audience of men.
These first scenes from Jia Zhangke Taken by the tidesBetween the outgoing bac (Li Zhubin) and his Qiaoqiao girlfriend (Zhao Tao), outline the same frame used to climb so many westerns: there is the man who leaves for the border and the woman he leaves behind. And as in many JIA films, the little story of Bin and Qiaoqiao is the line line for something that is protected far beyond. Jia, who is one of the best known Chinese filmmakers who still works in his country of origin, has spent more than 25 years making films that have established delicate ties between lovers, families and friends against large -scale thrill and the brutality of the Hurtle of China in the 21st century. In his work, the dams are built, the cities are shaved and skyscrapers shoot in the sky. Often, his real subject is who or what is dragged into the process – the ancients who cannot keep pace, workers abandoned by their government, the old songs that everyone can feel to begin to forget. Taken by the tides is one of his most recommended films to date, because of how he has been made: he and his publishers have mostly built on two decades of B-Roll images and documentaries captured while working on other projects, from 2001 to 2022. Only the last section, shot during the Pandemic, was expressly created to serve this story. From this handbag of truth and discoveries, Jia builds an epic. Or is it more a praise?
The film takes the time to present its protagonists. It opens with a series of independent documentary scenes, lingering in an area, then looking in the domestic space of certain workers who are laughing and roasting while singing in turn folk songs and ballads. It was in 2001 in Datong, a city in the Shanxi coal extraction province. A more capitalist China itself reveals itself – Beijing has just won its offer for the 2008 Olympic Games; Soon, the country will join the World Trade Organization – and when Qiaoqiao will finally appear, it looks like an envoy for this future, selecting it in the abandoned streets in a Bob wig, tight pants and kitten heels. Zhao has been working with Jia since the late 90s (and married him in 2011), and his quick and precise physique carries the film – because his character does not have a single line of dialogue. Whether Qiaoqiao runs in town to carry out various works by hot girls, such as modeling to promote a new shopping center or shake it at the club at the Euro trash dance, it is agile and receptive, ready for the new one. Bin, when we finally see it, almost seems to be wanting to open it: while it turns on the dance floor, it flocked, smoking, on the sidelines. He will leave the city shortly after.
Jia prohibits this first section with documentary scenes from young dancing on Chinese nightclubs, is advisable with pleasure in a way that their parents, who crossed the cultural revolution, could not have imagined. In China, the gap of yawning generation wider than in the United States; So much changed so quickly in recent decades that moving between the districts of a Chinese city can look like a time trip, from the new brilliant development to unchanged courses for a century. But you don’t have to know that to grasp the delirium of this time. Jia defines the shimmies of his dancers to the Danish ear “butterfly” which had an endless half-life like the default song preloaded on Chinese mobile phones and children’s toys outside the Junky brand. This young madness stops short when the film jumps in 2006: here again Qiaoqiao, older and more sober dressed in Kakis and Polo, on a ferry through the three gorges in southern China. We see his text bac, his message again displayed as a title card on the screen: “I’m here from Datong who is looking for you.”
When you could realize: We have already been here. Because if you saw Jia’s latest film, 2018 The ash is the purest whiteyou have. This film also talks about a woman named Qiao who goes in search of her boyfriend Bin and used many of the same parameters and even some of the same photos. But JIA’s images of this particular landscape are even older than that: his team captured it while shooting his 2006 film Still lifeIn which Zhao played, once again, a woman looking for a man named Bin. (The 2001 scenes were filmed during the 2002 production Unknown pleasures.) Although the creation of bits and Taken by the tides Was presented as a rare process for JIA, he often returns to old images in his work, either cut it directly, or use it to inspire new scenarios. He refuses to leave the past alone, and the fact that he has now used the three gorges in several films tells us something about his fixings. He continues to come back to the scene of what he could simply consider as a crime: in 2006, the city of Fengjie – the framework for a large part of Still life (And AshAnd Taken by the tides) – was slowly subsumed by the increase in water levels of the three gorges dam project. Millions of people have been moved by the creation of the largest dam in the world. Comties and whole stories have been lost forever. In Taken by the tidesJia lingers on documentary scenes from forced migrants from the region while waiting for a ferry. Some have televisions; Others dry personal effects in woven baskets worn like backpacks. “We do this for our country,” said the camera. An advertiser on the Ferry of Qiaoqiao Epelle him: “Beautiful landscapes will be underwater and in ruin.”
Jia recycling is not random or erroneous. He is an artist who tightens all the juice of his lemon: how many different ways can we show us that the development of China leaves people behind? We also think that Zhao, in each film, brings enough to carry several characters. Its reissue and reuse of its performance is a marvel. In The ash is the purest whiteHe used his images to portray his qiao as a outspokenness and intelligent, a right shooter who simply cannot have had (except, unfortunately, by bac). Work with the same reserve for Taken by the tidesHe now throws it as a silent observer whose lack of editorialization allows us to see through his eyes. Jia uses each piece of what Zhao gives: the change of thought that she signals with the widening of her eyes or a joyful smile, a stiffness of the shoulder or an darkening of the forehead. While the two -bit bin gangster remains wrapped in his own plans (we learn that he spent his years in Fengjie getting rushing into a corruption scandal), Qiaoqiao looks outwards. We watch her look at the old world collapse.
Qiaoqiao accepts what’s going on around her. But its apparent passivity is not as tragic as Bin’s self-involvement. In the last section of the film, shot in the masked surroundings of 2022, we are reintroduced by tank on a plane. It is now with gray hair and depends on a cane, washed and exhausted. He has never gained stability in his shaded commercial transactions and was forced to travel again in search of work. When he finally finds himself in Datong, he runs to Qiaoqiao. The dusty streets where the two in the past are unrecognizable, filled with KFC and McDonald’s and young people who have never learned the old revolutionary songs. When Bin and Qiaoqiao come together, it looks the first time they have been clear – and Qiaoqiao seems the most comfortable. Bin offers excuses but explanations. “I went back. There were not many opportunities there, ”he told him. She still doesn’t say a word. There is more loss between them than any sentence could not contain. There is no house to return at the end of this odyssey which is no more or less than life in China in the first two decades of the 21st century. It is both as crazy and as normal as that.
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