“The Wild Fires” by Jia Zhangke, snippets of a thousand fires – Libération

From twenty years of rushes, the filmmaker constructs a remarkable love story, shot through by the changes in 21st century China.

At the end of the gala screening in Cannes of Caught by the Tides (which comes out in France under the title Wild Firesknowing that the original title would rather be “Romantic Generation”!) the lights of the room came back on with the main actress Zhao Tao, companion of Jia Zhangke, completely upset and in tears. We can understand her because she had just seen more than twenty years of her own fictional life unfold on a giant screen from the beginning of the new century until today, in a large retrospective of Zhangke's work and, in fact, , a journey through two decades of transformations in China of gigantic proportions.

It is a completely unusual film because the filmmaker, partly blocked by the pandemic, shot very few sequences, except for the last part allowing him to document the distressing atmosphere of megacities under Covid, the essential part of the story being composed from the kilometers of rushes which had accumulated over the course of his various feature films. “In the first third of the film, there are many unrelated fragments, which