Let yourself suggest an approach to vision: try to conceive romantic generation more as a film to listen to than one to watch. Let’s not misunderstand ourselves, it is clear that the film by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke, at the cinema from April 17 with Tucker Film, maintains a fundamental character in the act of vision, and will be said later. But the guide track is in the musical current that runs through it from top to bottom: from the sacred to the traditional, from pop to electronics. An almost incessant vibration, a sensory vessel that is above.

Not only that, the sounds and environmental noises also participate in the concert, auditory contaminations that certify the scaffolding of an anthropological story that has the background China and its change. A story, written by Zhangke with Wan Jiahuan and presented in competition at the Cannes 2024 festival, which rejects a conventional linear narrative in favor of a hypnotic conscience flow, where the individual is granted to the world that contains it, where the fiction mixes with the documentary.

Romantic generation, plot and characters

It is the story of a changing country, gentrifies, you can see the landscape profile deface and know the proliferation of corruption and bructism building, which is submerged by a wealth too immense and too quickly. But it is also the story of a stubborn woman, Qiao Qiao (Zao Thao), who chases a man who escapes, Bin (Li Zhubin), who denies and denies the other a feeling. In placing them at the center of his rarefied dance, a romantic generation makes an unreliable humanistic fresco that begins in 2001, passes through 2006, bursts in 2022, starts from the city of Datong and crosses the three gorge dam.

Together he blends different formats of recovery, styles and approaches in a catalyst of charm and melancholy, whose great peculiarity lies in collecting materials shot by Zhangke over 22 years, some coming from the previous works of the director. For this reason the two protagonists almost never interpret a direct conversation, they are lost in their daily activities and in their personal affairs, also with the help of tricks that the author inserts within the film with great naturalness and consistency – for example the signs with captions during some dialogues.

In the meantime, the two age. And they actually age within these images above which the invitation to get lost is dictated by the sound landscape, but in which the very meaning of an inexorable metamorphosis is preserved in front of which Qiao Qiao seeks in his way of resisting, the only witness in the asynchronous flows of the time. Do not be fooled by the Italian title, the international one has no equal: Caught by the Tides, that is, captured, entangled, attracted by the tides; Beautiful.

The inability to dialogue

From north to south, from clans of the new millennium to Covid (the latter the only sequences shot in contemporary China), from the first brands that signal the attempt at capitalist colonization to slide inside the algorithmic trends of Tiktok, Zhangke then focuses on that apocalyptic vortex (but without apocalyptism) of the progressive and almost definitive disintegration of the communication sphere – of Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘incommunicability’ of the cinema.

In which the male makes himself dazzled and comes to thinking out in the face of the hatchet to recognize themselves in the present and where women perhaps buy a voice that they did not before. Two aspects synthesized with skill in the wonderful ending, in perfect counterbalance to positions also observed at the beginning of the film. But in which in the meantime, we have also found ourselves surrounded by QR code, robots and artificial intelligences, compressed but distant – a caption reads “so close yet so far” – in the sidereal spaces of digital and in hyper -surgery and hyper -invigiilated environments (the cities of China are among the most disturbingly monitored and scanned in the world).

Of romantic generation then affects how not to observe or stories revolutionary things, but how he manages to do it peacefully, without pedantry, with agility of gaze and reflection. Two things that in the case of this film really coincide, as too often happens in contemporary cinema, which shows everything and is almost never able to say anything. And even more, it is surprising how Jia Zhangke was able to do it gently by gently on this story starting from the mosaic of its cinema, where she found inner internal rhymes in which one resonates in the many.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vade3tfjq9o