Jia Zhangke's Caught By the Tides, in Official Competition at Cannes 2024: Our opinion

Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides may be a fiction film (his first since 2018's Les Eternels ), but it has all the makings of a documentary. Presented in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the Chinese master's new film looks back at the frenetic globalization of his homeland in the early 2000s. To do so, the filmmaker took extracts from his previous films, blending them with a wealth of archive footage and new rushes - for the last, most recent part of the film.

But Caught by the Tides is not just for Jia Zhangke regulars, and many will be touched by the story of the failed love affair between Qiao Qiao(Zhao Tao, the director's favorite actress who is also his wife) and Guao Bin(Zhubin Li, who reunited with Jia Zhang-Ke after the excellent A Touch of Sin). When the latter leaves her to try his luck in another province, Qiao Qiao embarks on a cross-China journey to find her lost love, from the north to the south of a country in the throes of change.

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With almost no dialogue, but interspersed with numerous musical moments (the workers' traditional songs, karaoke sequences set to Eurodance), the film presentsChina's recent history in three major acts. It begins in 2001 in the coal-mining village of Datong, continues in the city of Fengjie in 2006, then returns to Datong during the Covid health crisis. Each period is represented by a different image format and graphic quality, offering a contrasting and poetic insight into the country that Jia Zhangke continues to explore year after year.

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