Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
Find all of our Cannes 2024 coverage here.
Those fearing cinema’s obsolescence in the face of more popular media—an anxiety that now seems an existential characteristic of the art—will be glad to find in Cannes the obligatory films that court relevance and awards by centering on an Important Topic. These are the loud films, which anticipate being pounced upon with flash-pan hot takes.
But other movies at the festival are playing a longer and subtler game. They’re not necessarily quiet—in fact, one is a knockabout martial-arts film—but what they do, they do with deceptive ease, without any pandering or grandstanding. Their ambition creeps up on you. Their subjects are inextricable from their forms; rather than a plug-and-play insertion of topic into narrative, there appears only this way of telling such a story. The stories themselves, whether told by classical or more radical means, are impressive: the evolution of a country; the retaking of a lost city; the casting aside of death’s pall. The impact, even of the most vibrant montage or kinetic fight scene, comes later. Consummate moviemaking of such caliber promises to outlast many of the festival’s premieres currently attracting the most attention.
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024).
Jia Zhangke’s new feature, like his last two, Mountains May Depart (2015) and Ash Is Purest White (2018), uses a grand, years-spanning episodic structure, shot on various film formats, to chart the evolution of China in the early 21st century. Caught by the Tides, which played in competition and took home no awards, continues this project in a highly unusual way that is at once understated and formidable. Using footage from several different film shoots dating back to 2001 and weaving a new narrative from actress Zhao Tao’s presence in all of these productions, Jia crafts from the sidelines of his oeuvre something between a drama and an essay film, which tells the story of an ordinary couple drifting apart as China heaves itself out of the past and into the present.
Another film featuring footage spanning an astonishing period of time, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), may seem the nearest conceptual comparison, but its subject is a young person coming of age, whereas Jia’s is a society in time. Taking place in 2001, 2006, and 2022, and featuring footage and film formats from those years, Caught by the Tides moves from an era in which life is rooted in tradition, following workers at a hardscrabble factory (for which Jia returns to Datong, in the province of Shanxi, where he shot his first three features), through a catalyzing period of tremendous transformation (set in the Three Gorges Dam area of Fengjie, as seen in Still Life [2006] and Ash Is Purest White), and ends in the pandemic era (a Datong now thoroughly modernized with WeChat, AI-powered robots, and TikTok influencers). Our anchors in this spare story are the magnetic Zhao—one of the few actors who could carry a whole movie made mostly of old footage with a wordless performance—who begins the film playing a liquor-advertising model, and Li Zhubin, who plays her manager and boyfriend. They enter into a contentious and mostly oblique relationship: Li mysteriously leaves in search of greater opportunities in 2001, Zhao searches for him in 2006, and their long-separated lives converge again in 2022.
This structure and all of its dramatic tendrils guide us through the years and changing recording formats, from early DV to 35mm to high-definition video, the image texture evolving across the pocket epochs as the China Jia captures does too. The couple’s failed romance is subsumed by a nation’s seismic changes. The cumulative effect of Jia’s grand vision is at first somewhat muted. The viewer must grapple with the collage of footage, in which something whole is made from scraps (a metaphor itself), and Li is hardly a match for Zhao’s on-screen presence. Being more intimately familiar with the director’s past movies, as well as with the more culturally specific references, would no doubt enhance the evocations of this boldly conceived time-traveling story. Total naïveté, too, might yield something more moving than my experience; I kept seeing close plot affinities to Ash Is Purest White and was often distracted, as with a Jean-Luc Godard film, by guessing the original provenance of any given scene. Ultimately, however, the overall sense is of a creatively restless cinema; of an artist looking, playing, and valiantly experimenting to find the right forms for the stories that he wants to tell. His daunting challenge and admirable ambition is that the form of his films always reckon with the history of his country, a subject so vast that it provides an endless source of material and inspiration for new kinds of moviemaking. And building from cinema’s intrinsic subject of time’s passing to follow a nation through time feels very new indeed.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Cheang Soi, 2024).
Meanwhile, in southern China, we can find at the heart of a big action film a different vantage point on history. Cheang Soi’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In—relegated, as most well-budgeted genre cinema is at Cannes, out of competition—is set in Kowloon Walled City in 1980s Hong Kong. An anachronistic microcosm of unregulated urban and moral decay, the neighborhood serves as a synecdoche for the island city itself. This confined yet sprawling setting lets Cheang’s martial-arts picture bask in the pseudo-squalor of a studio-recreated slum, with bulging architectonic bric-a-brac, wire-strewn and labyrinthine across three dimensions. The isolated neighborhood is fraught with drugs and prostitution and violently contested by gangsters (including the legendary Sammo Hung as a Triad boss)—surely a Hong Kong of the past and not the Beijing-governed present.
But the film is up to other things with this world-within-a-world of the past. The Walled City is portrayed as depressed and crime-ridden, yet also has a fully functional community that helps those in need, requires no outside resources or assistance, and is benignly overseen (but not ruled) by an aging Triad (Louis Koo), frequently shown in cool, wistful repose. The story also adapts a common figure of Cheang’s past movies, such as Dog Bite Dog (2006): that of a dehumanized male outsider who maintains a primal, violent drive to survive in Hong Kong’s capitalist melting pot. The twist is that the orphan refugee (Raymond Lam) of Walled In learns he is, in fact, Hong Kong–born. Thus the thrust of the story—innervated by Kenji Tanigaki’s thrillingly elaborate, bone-cracking fight choreography, which is the primary pleasure of the film—is of a lost Hong Kongese reclaiming his home, rebuilding his life, and ultimately fighting tooth and nail to protect his community in the Walled City from gangster incursions and property speculation. The slum was demolished in 1994 in advance of the Handover to China, and while Walled In may seem like an action movie coated in nostalgic grunge, there is a powerful fable here: that Hong Kongers who feel adrift, searching for identity, home, and safety, might just find it again by restoring solidarity and self-rule in their city walled in by water.
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024).
Busy moving toward the future, neither Caught by the Tides nor Walled In mourn the past. David Cronenberg, several decades older than both Jia and Cheang, is able to do both at once in his slyly actionless new film. The Shrouds, the 81-year-old’s competition entry (no prizes either), is named after a new invention that is wrapped around bodies of the dead to provide live 3D video footage of their decomposing bodies. While those mourning may still be physically separated from their buried loved ones, they can approximate an uncanny, even profane intimacy with the bodies and their corporeal decay. The apparatus is the cornerstone of a cemetery business that is the brainchild of grief-stricken entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who is still consumed by the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) by a cancer so voracious that it required her surgical oncologist to slowly deconstruct her body piece by piece. Now, via a video screen on the gravestone as well as a mobile app, Karsh can access the reality of his wife’s literal fading away whenever he wishes.
Yet bodily contact is not the only component of love, nor of grief; and while the shroud makes for a rapidly expanding business, it doesn’t help Karsh; the technology may be grand (soon to be offered in 8K!), taboos broken, frontiers of death crossed, but still, he dreams of Becca coming back to him at night with an increasingly dissevered and fragile body, calmly, bravely telling him of her disintegration. After vandals destroy part of the cemetery and encrypt many of its video feeds, cutting off access to the dead, including to Karsh’s wife, the film turns into a solemn detective story in which Karsh searches for culprits ranging from eco-terrorists to the Chinese, who may be after a global mesh network surveilling the living and the dead. The latter plot is encouraged by Becca’s conspiracy-theorist sister (also Kruger), who looks just like her dead sibling, as well as her ex-husband, Karsh’s brother (Guy Pearce), who helped develop the shroud but is himself now spiraling from general paranoia and grief over his dead marriage.
An introspective and cerebral film fully steeped in a defensively muted grief, The Shrouds is predominantly composed of discussions about how to deal with profound loss as well as the possibilities and implications of being an e-connected corpse voyeur. Fittingly for a late-career chamber piece, there is minimal incident and even the morbid technological side of the film is downplayed: Karsh’s futuristic ability to watch a dead body he loves be stripped of the flesh proves not nearly as therapeutic as sex with various partners. The Shrouds has a tone of austere melancholy—it is notable that Cronenberg’s own wife died of cancer in 2017, and Cassel is made up with a gray pompadour much like his director—that is strangely compelling when combined with a comic self-awareness of the discrepancy between primordial feelings about the dead and the automation and techno-assistance of our proto-cyborgian daily life, replete with apps, digital assistants, video calls, and self-driving cars.
The film is a dark and tender pleasure, underscored by Cassel’s precise and sincere embodiment of someone torn between wanting to crawl into the grave next to his wife and wanting to claw his way out of the tomb that his daily existence has become. Those hoping for a wild body-horror conclusion or even the kinky imagery of Crimes of the Future (2022) will be disappointed. But Cronenberg’s surprisingly anticlimactic yet affecting finale cuts like a knife through the knotty conspiratorial and philosophical possibilities of the scenario. It resolves with the acceptance of loss and the arrival of a future with new bodies, beings, and graves to embrace. The shroud, with its cinematic ability to show images of those no longer with us, will live on. How we choose to deal with those images of the past will be up to us. We can choose how to use the tools cinema has given us to query our precarious world, and what to do with our discoveries.
