THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Incredible film by Jia Zhang-ke, both disconcerting and fascinating, that these Wild fires. As if, at 54, the greatest poet and chronicler – with the documentary filmmaker Wang Bing – of the great Chinese change of the 21ste century stood still for a moment, looked back, stunned, on the contemporary history of his country as well as on himself. In fact, carried out during the confinement due to Covid-19, which we know was drastic in China, the experience seems to want to draw a cinematographic lesson from the relationship with cinema of its author, inaugurated in 1997 with the fabulous Xiao Wu, artisan pickpocketa vibrant and melancholic portrait, in a Baudelairian word, of a petty delinquent caught in a continental China that the film, so lively, seemed to show, as if for the first time, to be seen.
In Wild Firesthe filmmaker therefore builds a good part of the film on old personal images. Views accumulated over the years, as well as shots taken from films such Unknown pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006), The Eternals (2018). He takes, from within their own intrigues and intentions, a few places (Datong, Fengjie and Zhuhai), symbols of the varied speeds of the country’s transformation. A woman, muse and actress in almost all of her films: Zhao Tao. And a man: the actor Zhubin Li, who appears in several of the author’s films. And rewritten from these images, with new costs, a fable which runs through his entire cinema, determines its dimension that is both thrilling and discreetly elegiac, a fable which tells us that the world always goes faster than men.
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