Cannes 2024 – Jia Zhangke, Leos Carax : Ruin and haunting

For cinema lovers who are already in Paris or who will be this week, we strongly recommend that, in order to soothe the possible FOMO of not being in Cannes, they assiduously attend the Cinémathèque Française’s complete retrospective of Marguerite Duras’ films, which is being screened there until the end of May. Among them, we recommend one in particular: Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta(1976), a brilliant and liminal film, in which she uses the entire soundtrack of her previous film, India Song (1975), but replaces its images with shots of the place where India Song was shot, now abandoned. On the soundtrack, the film. On the screen, its ruin, its haunting.

This weekend at Cannes, two filmmakers also chose to re-stage material they had already shot: Léos Carax in It’s Not Me (presented for special screenings) and Jia Zhangke in Caught by the Tides (in the official competition). Carax practices a kind of self-portrait as a filmmaker and cinephile, ordering a post-Godard saraband – in the vein of Histoire(s) du cinéma – of the images that have built him and those he has built, through an anthology of his own films. Some of the overlaps have their effect, and the exercise, while not deprived of some sens of self-satisfaction, is quite virtuoso.

Jia Zhangke’s relationship to his own images is quite different. The filmmaker had the idea of drawing on the stocks of unedited footage from several of his previous films to tell a different story from that of the films mentioned. Using outtakes from Unknown Pleasures (2003) and Still Life (2007), and adding new footage shot last year, Jia Zhangke composes a sublime and minimalist melodrama.  But it’s also an exceptional documentary depicting the transformation of China in the first quarter of the 21st century, and a prodigious piece on how time works on the human body – those of his two favorite actors, Li Zhubin and Zhao Tao – and how cinema works with this time and its transformative capabilities on  bodies. But also a revisiting of his own cinema, a recycling of his own shots for a second use in an incredibly inventive ecology of images. And finally, for the viewer, a journey through his own life as an avid Jia Zhangke spectator. As we relive all the motifs we’ve loved – like that little yellow blouse worn by Zhao Tao in Still Life – it’s not only Jia Zhangke’s cinema that rewinds before our eyes, but also our past emotions, the places where we saw these films, the people who accompanied us, what we said about them – in short, our entire existence. In all its ruin and haunting.