Avis des critiques

Even without access to all that it references, “I Wish I Knew” functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times. 

Weaving a beautiful, dreamlike path through history, I Wish I Knew is less documentary as essay film than documentary as prose poem.

There are moments in the Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s “I Wish I Knew” when you feel agreeably unmoored. Beguiling images flicker across the screen and an unidentified woman (Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife and usual star) snaps open a hand fan. Later, she wanders through enigmatic, rubbly landscapes like an Antonioni heroine.

I Wish I Knew moves forward and backward in time, like memory, or like the tides in the waters that surround Shanghai, a port city.

It’s in Jia’s canny choice of subjects that I Wish I Knew reveals itself to be an expansive exploration of Shanghai as a cultural center shaken by converging historical forces.

A minor but fascinating film in Jia’s provocative oeuvre.

Call it sentimental postmodernism—and the essential first entry in Jia Zhangke’s 2010s filmography, the most essential of the decade.

The camera is rarely stationary, but when it is, an overpowering sense of loss and sadness settles in. The soundtrack, designed by Giom Lam, who also worked on Hou's Goodbye South, Goodbye, commingles the ambient sounds of the Bund (like the song "The East is Red," which rings from the clock tower every hour) with elegiac soundtrack music—and seems to emanate from the misty air, adding a phantom aura to the atmosphere.

Less thematically simple than the director's previous work and less concerned with multi-hued visual pleasure (Yu Likwai's digital cinematography, comprised primarily of grays, whites, and browns, is the exact opposite of his colorful work in The World, though it's certainly not without its own stark splendor), Jia's latest is arguably both his most abstract and his most straightforward work as well as the one with the longest historical reach.

The poignant historical ironies of the Chinese director Jia Zhangke's documentary, commissioned by last year's Shanghai World Expo, begin with the title... Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies...

Far more than 24 City, Jia's film is a delicate web of associations between interviews and clips... Jia's cinematic language is always polyvalent, and his juxtapositions flower gradually across the span of the entire film.

Whether due to the need for official state approval or waned inspiration, the video is Jia on autopilot, haphazardly placing drifting, beautiful digital images of contemporary Shanghai along with overly leisurely and visually flat interviews with people whose personal history has been infused by the city, but whose connection to the China of here and now is left tantalizingly out of reach.