Presented in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival under the title Feng Liu Yi Dai (literally “a generation adrift”), Jia Zhang-Ke’s latest opus has become Wild Fires for its French theatrical release. A choice which does not say much about the content of the work, nor its formal originality, a mixture of fiction and documentary.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, the Chinese filmmaker has undertaken to document the changes in his country, without really knowing what he was going to do with these images shot in different formats, which were aging more or less well. In 2021, stopped by confinement, he found the thread that could connect them: a long-term love story between a man and a woman who meet, look for each other and end up finding each other in their fifties .
Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite actress) is a lively and sassy young woman, a bit of a singer, a bit of a model at the start of the story. She will become silent as she follows in the footsteps of Bin (Li Zhubin), her lover who went south to do business, without leaving an address. This thin thread of fiction, so loose that we sometimes lose sight of it without it really being a problem, is grafted onto a journey over the last two decades, from the exhaustion of coal mines to the Covid-19 pandemic. .
Construction sites meant to embody the greatness of the country
The enigmatic beauty of the film is as much due to this figure of an inscrutable and obstinate woman as to the cohabitation of layers of time, to the superposition of landscapes and faces, ruins and construction sites supposed to embody the greatness of the country in anticipation of the Olympic Games in 2008. By filming, in the first part, the black faces of the miners of Datong or the unemployed workers who sing for a few yuan in a palace of culture Decayed, Jia Zhang-Ke keeps the trace of a China that is disappearing.
Although it takes the form of a contemplative odyssey, the film does not hide the repression of homosexuality, the supervision of citizens by the omnipresence of Big Brother-style loudspeakers, modernization and internal emigration forced march. Carried by the determination of Qiaoqiao, a character already seen in Still Life et the Eternalsthis composite and hypnotic film is also a journey inside the filmmaker’s work.
Wild Firesby Jia Zhang-ke, China, 1:51 a.m., released in theaters on January 8, 2025.
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