Courtesy of NEON.

Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center (MUBI).

New York Film Festival 2025:

The Secret Agent/O Agente Secreto
Below the Clouds/Sotto le nuvole

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi

The timing of these three 2025 New York Film Festival dispatches has only gotten later and later, and I’m getting this in right before the new year, which in a way feels apt. Writing these words more than three months and over two thousand miles away from where I first encountered Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds—two key films of this year that exist in entirely different registers yet share a marked kinship—I can still remember much of the sensation, if not the specifics of seeing both in the Walter Reade press screenings. Granted, one film’s screening was much more full and has accordingly received something on the order of a thousand times more recognition, but both experiences were charged with a certain feeling of a continual awakening, one corresponding with both films’ ability to evolve their ever-broadening sense of place and time.

Only one of these films is by an established documentarian, but in an odd sense Kleber Mendonça Filho is the one to have marshaled a surge of interest in his past work, fiction and nonfiction alike. The Secret Agent is his first film in the former mode since Bacurau (2019, co-directed with his past production designer Juliano Dornelles), whose breakout potential was somewhat stymied by its US theatrical release coinciding with the pandemic. His follow-up, however, was the formerly too-little seen Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his second documentary after his debut/farewell to his past career as a film critic Crítico (2008). I had the fortune to see it and meet Mendonça Filho during its brief window of Oscar aspirations, with little knowledge of what was to come.

The Secret Agent distinguishes itself from all of Mendonça Filho’s prior films almost immediately. It is the first to take place mainly in the past, heralded by a chyron with a curious addendum: 1977, “a time of great mischief.” That sentiment, during a year smack-dab in the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship, is some mix of playful irony and sober summation that runs through nearly every interaction in the film. It accompanies Armando (Wagner Moura) as he drives to Mendonça Filho’s hometown of Recife in the midst of a certain amount of strife: a large number of Carnaval-related deaths, the discovery of a human leg inside a shark’s stomach, a lawsuit involving a wealthy woman’s negligent killing of her servant’s child. Though further blood will be spilled, and Armando is initially held up at a gas station by a suspicious police officer, it becomes clear that Mendonça Filho is most interested in the atmosphere of the city, using every bit of The Secret Agent‘s two hours and forty minutes to delve into all that makes up the city he has already evoked in Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius. While this present film does focus in on certain enclaves, and the former two films had their fair share of perambulation, the scale afforded here allows for the most vivid canvas Mendonça Filho has ever painted on.

To match, The Secret Agent—whose title is (once more, and in amusing counterpoint to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind) an ironic and yet oddly fitting for the star at its center, taken from a passing view of the trailer for the Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring Le Magnifique—operates according to a slowly unfurling narrative that can contain such myriad sights as covert telephone calls, bustling street celebrations, and a Holocaust survivor played by Udo Kier. Aside from saying the film makes it apparent that Armando is on the run from something, and that the main object of his visit to Recife is to reconnect with his son, it’s better to leave the exact details of his circumstances to be experienced. Indeed, one of the more potent cinematic sequences this year is a roughly half-hour stretch in the middle of the film where Armando tells his story to representatives of a political group in the room next to the projection booth where his father-in-law works, the only place currently safe for him. As he recounts his travails and flashbacks gradually intrude, presenting a long-haired version of the man the viewer has gotten to know over the previous hour, it thrusts the pains of history and cavalier oppression upon the viewer just as surely as it does to all those in the room.

Not just the room, but those outside of it as well. With the prominent use of the São Luiz Cinema, the resurgence of interest in Jaws prompted by the news item, and an increasingly important subplot that I won’t go into here, The Secret Agent reconfigures itself yet again as a film about memory—and in turn film’s capacity for housing said memory—one where every building in the city carries the weight of its past that in turn is in danger of being forgotten. It’s not for nothing that Pictures of Ghosts has been rediscovered and rightly hailed as a valuable precursor to this film: the few cinemas that he chronicled in that documentary that are still standing have received a movie steeped in the cinematic grammar of its time period, yet defiantly local and proud of its own heritage. After the fireworks of the climax, there is an air of wistful assurance that suffuses the coda, where the past lingers even among those who can no longer remember it.

That past is as present as ever in Below the Clouds, Gianfranco Rosi’s latest endeavor. Rosi presents a curious case in contemporary non-fiction cinema: by at least one standard, he is the most successful documentarian alive, having come within a Palme d’or of completing the Golden Treble—now that Thierry Frémaux seems to be willing to have non-fiction films in Cannes Competition, who’s to say what might happen. At the same time, his footprint is largely unknown in the US, with his previous, somewhat controversial Notturno (2020) getting mired in the pandemic and his Golden Bear-winning Fire at Sea (2016) barely making a splash. Both films dealt directly with topical issues—Middle Eastern war zones and Mediterranean refugees, respectively—in what has become Rosi’s signature, kaleidoscopic style, cycling between various unrelated subjects within a relatively constrained sphere of operation, comparing and contrasting their respective situations.

Such an approach is used to ever-greater effect in Below the Clouds which is no less engaged with the problems of the present yet situates them in a more discernible, nearly serene context: the city of Naples. The title presumably refers to the emissions from Mount Vesuvius, the shadow that looks over more than a million people every day. Shooting in black-and-white for the first time since his debut Boatman (1993), Rosi begins by taking stock of the place he and the viewer will inhabit for the next two hours with super-long shots of the city’s many buildings and the volcano, before suddenly tunneling into one of many increasingly disparate perspectives.

Even more than most documentaries, Below the Clouds cannot be talked about in terms of a traditional narrative, considering the polyphonic nature of its development and little individual rhymes. A brief recounting, then, of (most of) its key narratives: an emergency call center that fields serious incidents, fears over an impending eruption, and people who just want to know the time alike; police officers investigating a spate of tombaroli break-ins in what feels like a mild riposte to Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera; a group of Japanese researchers delving further into the ruins of Pompeii; a curator in the catacombs of a museum, looking over the statues and other material; a shopkeeper who opens his doors to watch over a number of students as they study various topics; and, in something of a coup of topical issues, a cargo ship staffed by Syrians who deliver grain picked up from Odesa, Ukraine. Woven throughout these are shots from within a metro train winding through the city and shots within a decaying, empty cinema as scenes from films related to Naples play on the screen: Journey to Italy is easily the most prominent of these, though I think I also saw the 1913 silent film The Last Days of Pompeii; at least one appears to be an industrial documentary.

Many of these storylines are of sufficient interest that an entire (albeit shorter) documentary could be made about each of them, but Below the Clouds is most in thrall to the push-pull of the past and present, the way a textbook entry about Pompeii formerly being a major trader of grain in the shopkeeper narrative can suddenly illuminate the cargo ship story, or the continual eeriness of watching people interact almost interchangeably with statues and people volcanically sealed into stasis. Sometimes Rosi can be a bit too eager to dot his i’s, like in one scene in the museum where the curator muses about how being in an especially dark and statue-filled room feels like stepping into the past. But the beauty of his digital images, with flashlight beams cutting through darkness and fragmented shots of the city lit up at night, only enhances the feeling of a film, like The Secret Agent, which belongs to a city out of time.

Courtesy of NEON.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Sirāt

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Óliver Laxe

Forgive me for opening what’s putatively a New York Film Festival review (written and published more than a month after Closing Night) with a personal experience from earlier this week in Los Angeles. I attended one of the more improbable events related to an arthouse film I’ve ever heard of: a rave for Sirāt, presided over by director Óliver Laxe and primarily driven by composer and DJ Kangding Ray, held at the Regent Theater. Though the event stretched from before 10 PM to (though I didn’t stay until the end) 2 AM, the centerpiece was a roughly 45-minute block in the middle, where the more familiar if anonymous electronic beats melted away in favor of a non-chronological presentation of the film’s score, which only sometimes goes full techno. On the screen, scenes and outtakes from the film played out, projected by Laxe from a laptop on the other side of the table of Ray. As the sizable crowd watched, swaying and gradually getting more energetic, the towering director remained hunched over, almost immobile, absorbed in what felt increasingly like a task that required the utmost precision.

While the rave was not at all a replacement for the film it sought to promote, that dichotomy sums up as well as anything the staggering achievement that is Sirāt, as vivid a bolt from the blue as any from this decade in film thus far. Little seemed to presage its arrival, which is not to say that Laxe was an entirely unknown quantity. The Galician director made his feature debut with You All Are Captains in 2010 at Cannes—the festival where all his films have premiered, including Mimosas (2016) and Fire Will Come (2019), both past NYFF selections. These works, while certainly deserving of their selections and plaudits—every one of these four films, including Sirāt with its main competition Jury prize, received an award at the festival—only hinted at what was to come. There was the forbidding beauty of the Moroccan desert, the quest-like narratives, and the magisterial opening and closing of Fire Will Come, but they were the service of perhaps deceptively small-scale narratives, where the wider implications seemed incidental to their characters.

Not so with Sirāt, which opens, not unlike Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, with the assembly of a mountain of speakers in the desert. As the music begins to reverberate, Laxe deploys a few shots of surrounding cliffs, before cutting to the already assembled mass of dancers. The great Spanish DP Mauro Herce’s 16mm camera focuses on a few revelers at a time, each given an equal amount of attention, with only an opening credit card to signal the constituents of the crew that will eventually become the film’s center. Into this scene ambles Luis (Sergi López) a Spanish father searching for his daughter—a raver who has been missing for a number of months—with his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) in tow.

Depending on the reader, this barest outline might be the best place to stop any further description of the narrative of Sirāt. To a degree almost unheard of in recent memory for a film that exists firmly in the arthouse space, critics have placed an emphasis on avoiding spoilers, considering the turns that the film takes. For my own part, I’ll simply note the following moments, but you can skip to the next paragraph if you’d prefer that: the rave is broken up by a contingent of soldiers, who say that an international armed conflict has broken out and that all Europeans must join their convoy. A group of five ravers across two heavy-duty trucks, who had previously mentioned that there would be another rave deeper in the Moroccan desert, manage to escape, followed by Luis and Esteban in their camper van.

But while the twists were essential to my first viewing and I wouldn’t want to take that away from anyone who wanted to experience that for themselves, it should be stressed that Sirāt is by no means a one-and-done, shock value film with nothing else of value; to confirm this I watched the film a second time and was not one iota less moved. Laxe’s choice of title—laid out in an opening intertitle giving the definition of a bridge connecting heaven and hell, narrower than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword—is perhaps none too subtle about the spiritual aims at its core, but his film is in essence an examination of connections between the sacred and the earthly, each tied in accordance to a certain set of rules that must be divined through experience. In this respect, rave culture (which I myself do not partake in) is a perfect medium within which the action unfolds, one actively undertaken by the characters at key moments but more often embodied in a certain attitude and way of living. Even more than most forms of dance, it is both communal—rarely taking place outside of a crush of people—and profoundly internal, deemphasizing all normal conceptions of music and lyrics in favor of pure impulse, a mode which no one person will respond to in quite the same way. Hence, while it is Luis’s quest that drives the film, Laxe does not seek to elevate his point of view above his companions, whose love of the rave is taken for granted as an integral part of themselves as much as Luis and Esteban’s familial ties.

Sirāt‘s recurring image, over and over, is of the three vehicles proceeding across a desolate landscape, the van always lagging behind but never completely out of view. It has already drawn comparisons to other perilous driving films—The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer of course, but Mad Max: Fury Road is just as evident—and for my own part I thought about Meek’s Cutoff, especially during an early scene where they must ford a river. But Laxe has cited a much more curious automotive journey as a primary referent: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, whose own car probably never travels over 55 miles per hour and never has to navigate terrain more treacherous than a slightly bumpy hill. And yet, this comparison cuts closely to the heart of what makes Sirāt so captivating: just like Mr. Badii, whose resolve to take the ultimate action is questioned and shaped by the happenstance companions he takes on along the way, so too are each of Laxe’s characters regarding their own motivations. As the film shrinks its focus further and further toward these seven people, two dogs, and three vehicles, its implications seem to escalate more and more, as their desperation becomes synonymous with all of existence. That World War III, the apocalypse, and the end of the world may all be happening in the background does not cheapen their trials for Laxe; instead, it affirms it. Sirāt is, if not a celebration, then as vivid a portrait as any in recent times of the ways in which people push past their limits in the most extreme of situations.

Courtesy of Late Film LLC.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Late Fame
Peter Hujar’s Day

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kent Jones
Directed by Ira Sachs

One of the presumably unintentional but noticeable trends that arose during the first week of the 63rd New York Film Festival’s press screenings was a consideration of art’s place in the world, often accompanied by an aesthetic that might be said to constitute a throwback. Films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which utilized thriller elements in tandem with a tumultuous ’70s backdrop, also featured extended meditations on how the experience of cinema and painting, respectively, can capture the spirit of then-modern sociopolitical currents. Two other films took 1970s artistry as their main subject: Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Though my familiarity with their work is roughly equal—both films are the second I’ve seen by their respective directors—and they belong to the same generation of Americans, the two filmmakers couldn’t be more dissimilar. Anyone who came to cinephilia in the past few years could be forgiven for not knowing the name Kent Jones, but there’s little excuse for anyone even remotely plugged into American film culture before then, considering his work as a longtime film critic—I routinely cite his piece on John Ford for Film Comment as one of my favorite articles of criticism—archivist (including for Martin Scorsese), and, most pertinently, director of the New York Film Festival for a surprisingly abbreviated term from 2013 to 2019. Though that span of time may be too short and recent to accurately judge, his tenure, especially considering Dennis Lim’s continual presence on the selection committee during that time, certainly helped usher along NYFF’s evolution into an ever more open and exploratory festival. In terms of his own filmmaking, Jones has already made a number of documentaries, and his fiction feature debut Diane (2018), a somber consideration of a woman near the end of her life, led him to leave film programming behind to make directing his main pursuit.

Ironically, I’m less familiar with Sachs: despite being five years Jones’s junior, he has already made nine features, starting with The Delta (1997). A mainstay of Sundance, with such celebrated works as Married Life (2007) and Love Is Strange (2014), along with a Cannes competition berth with the Isabelle Huppert-starring Frankie (2019), he had something of an unexpected mid-career resurgence with Passages, the only other film of his I’ve seen so far. A seemingly more overtly sensual work starring three of Europe’s most celebrated arthouse actors in Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adéle Exarchopoulos, it drew a seemingly larger than usual audience with its frank depiction of a queer love triangle inextricable from its apex’s bad behavior and badder outfits.

Both Late Fame and Peter Hujar’s Day, then, come as something of a pivot for both filmmakers. While the latter premiered, as usual, all the way back in Sundance—bypassing its predecessor’s summer MUBI release for this late but fitting New York fall festival spot—the former, contra the prior film’s Tribeca premiere, bowed in the Venice Orizzonti competition, an unexpected but deserved berth for an American independent film. The star is far more recognizable this time: Willem Dafoe plays the incongruously named Ed Saxberger, a poet of some minor renown in the late 1970s who works in today’s New York City as a post office employee, having settled into a comfortable routine of sorting letters and hanging out with barflies unaware of his past life. One day, he encounters Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the de facto leader of a young literary group known as the Enthusiasm Society, who has staked out his apartment and, over the course of a few effusive meetings, expresses his admiration for the erstwhile poet and asks him to join the society. As they gear up for a statement event and Saxberger attempts to write for the first time in decades, he draws closer to Gloria (Greta Lee), the only female member of the group, whose commitment to her acting aspirations and exaggerated mannerisms set her apart from the would-be mavericks.

Unlike Diane, Jones didn’t write the script for Late Fame, which was already penned by May December scribe Samy Burch, adapted to a modern American setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Though I had completely forgotten about this fact before the closing credits—and the screenplay doesn’t try to match the fiendish machinations on display in Todd Haynes’s film—it goes some ways in accounting for the renewed sense of relaxation that suffuses this film. From the opening montage, a stream of late-’70s New York avant-garde images that suggest the milieu in which Saxberger briefly practiced his craft, it is clear that Jones is interested in a much larger sense of place than the snowy woods of his previous film, and he takes care to recognize its hustle and bustle while also finding room for his hero’s own, more sanguine experience. The camera is wilder in its greater commitment to handheld, often used in tandem with rapid cutting during some of the larger group scenes, where a split-second shot of a minor member’s smirk adds to the viewer’s (and Saxberger’s) confusion while trying to understand his newfound milieu. In between these dialogue-heavy sequences, there are occasionally some lovely, rapid dissolves of the skies of New York, occupied by birds and buildings, which suggest Saxberger taking the temperature of his assumed home, a poetic mind still at work even as the form has fallen away.

Late Fame is, above all else, an often thrillingly imperfect film, one more open to the possibilities of total failure than Jones’s last film. From the inherent critique of these pretenders to the literary throne—the camera noticeably locks down for a few searing scenes that capture Meyers’s and his associates’ wealth—to Lee’s performance, which is so stylized and self-consciously that the expected reveal of her in a “normal” guise still carries a certain charge, the film risks being insular and even mean-spirited in its takedown of privileged posers, especially as the planned reading spirals further out of control. But it is all united under Dafoe, as warm and playfully rueful as he’s ever been, a force of calm in the midst of the chaos of his peers and his city. Crucially, though his poem is quite good (to my ears) and he does enjoy being feted, Saxberger, and therefore the film that he anchors, is free to slip in and out of these different modes; some are more successfully handled than others, but the lightness of its aging spirit is often unexpected and welcome.

Despite opening with the same camera slate opening as Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day is even more of a left turn for Sachs. Unlike Late Fame‘s fictional poet (but real poetry scene), the film takes not only real people but a very specific occurrence as its subject: in December 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) attempted to embark on a project where she would record artists she knew talking in minute detail about the events of their previous day. For her first and only entry—as laid out in intertitles at the beginning of the film—she chose Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a semi-prominent photographer; though the tape was subsequently lost, a transcript was retained, the contents of which provided the basis for this 76-minute film.

At first glance, Peter Hujar’s Day might seem even more self-satisfied, a 16mm-shot recounting of a fairly banal day in the life of a long-gone New York artist, with an extended anecdote about photographing Allen Ginsberg and stray references to Susan Sontag as perhaps the most readily discernible signposts to the average viewer. But though I can’t recall the precise wording of those title cards, they gesture towards what becomes compelling, even moving about this film. Because the transcript presumably contains no details as to the timespan of the recording, nor what may have transpired between its gaps, the film thus registers as a hybrid between audio reenactment of a documented event and an opportunity to imagine intimate, symbiotic actions of speaking and listening, full of little digressions, snacking, and movements between Rosenkrantz’s apartment and the building’s roof.

Sachs evokes this not only with a precision of framing within the Academy ratio frame, but also by constantly highlighting the inherently constructed nature of this production. Some are a bit more gratuitous than others—a recurring use of film rollouts, a few long shots where the slate and boom mic are visible, a handful of montages where preexisting music swells as Whishaw and Hall appear in poised repose—but they provide continual punctuation that remind the viewer of the work that must go into recreating Hujar’s attempt to recall his own past day. The film even appears to take place over the span of a few days, with a full day-night-day-night cycle, suggesting that to simply talk about one’s day in any detail at all itself takes more time than it does to live it. There, then is the crux of Peter Hujar’s Day‘s raison d’être: given that Hujar’s own recounting of his previous day’s happenings is inherently colored by his own perspective and the inevitable lapses in concentration and memory, the film is thus an imagining of a real event’s imagining of real events. That this all does not take away from the pleasures of existing in a long-gone artistic climate and of watching a gifted actor speaking and another strong actor intently listening is, in its own knowingly small way, more than a little impressive.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2024:

Caught by the Tides/风流一代/Fēngliú yīdài

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Jia Zhangke

Throughout his filmography, Jia Zhangke has refused to operate within clean dichotomies. Whether it be the tumult of his prominence and corresponding governmental approval—where Jia has alternately been censored or praised by the Chinese Communist Party depending on whichever film he’s made at a particular time—or his approach to form, his work is at once instantly recognizable yet always shifting according to his own predilections. Certain periods can be picked out: the opening stretch of his career lasting until 2006, his documentary period from 2008 to 2010, his genre-inflected epics from 2013 to the present. But such divisions are porous: Sean Gilman’s essential “14 Ways of Looking at Jia Zhangke” piece for MUBI Notebook provides a handy précis into his influences and tendencies, which course through these different periods, popping up at unexpected moments. Along with his wife and muse Zhao Tao, Jia’s filmography has been defined by his continuous charting of the currents of a rapidly modernizing China, with all the recursions and great leaps forward implied in such an artistic undertaking.

That being said, Jia has always retained the element of surprise, each new entry to his canon a left turn that expands the expressive potential of his cinema. The past four features alone have vividly demonstrated this: the mosaic of violence in A Touch of Sin, the futuristic decades-spanning melodrama of Mountains May Depart, the dedication to the gangster film in Ash Is Purest White, and the enormous evolution in his documentary abilities shown in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue.

And yet, Caught by the Tides, Jia’s first fiction feature in six years, registers as the most extreme leap since possibly Unknown Pleasures, precisely because of how much it may superficially resemble virtually all of his past films. When it was unveiled through the slow trickle of production updates and the announcement of the Cannes competition, all initially seemed normal. Like Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White, it was specified as a film taking place in three time periods over the course of a few decades; in particular, the idea of featuring Zhao Tao as a woman searching for her romantic partner hearkened back to the latter’s narrative. The central conceit of reusing footage in order to evoke the era in which previous films of his had taken place was intriguing, but didn’t necessarily register as something new, and most reviews have conveyed a sense of the film as largely resembling his recent period. Mountains May Depart‘s first section was in Academy ratio specifically to allow for this incorporation; meanwhile Ash Is Purest White begins with such footage and interlaces it throughout, and focuses on the same time periods as Caught: 2001, when Unknown Pleasures was filmed in Datong; 2005, corresponding to Still Life and decamping to the Three Gorges Dam-affected Fengjie; and the present day, back in Datong.

Any consideration of a film so deeply entrenched in its filmmaker’s oeuvre almost demands a more personal recounting of the writer’s relationship with said body of work. To be honest, as I was reading the logline and early reactions, I was a little bit worried that Jia was repeating himself: Mountains May Depart remains one of the most personally important films to me, and Ash Is Purest White is wondrously complex, but I was unsure if a third iteration would be sufficiently generative. Even as I saw the rapture with which numerous trusted friends received it and felt more at ease, it was still difficult to fully let go of that doubt. The extremity of my reaction may indeed be influenced by an equal sense of relief and awe, that the most important filmmaker currently active had found yet another way to completely overhaul his aesthetic interests. It probably doesn’t help that Unknown Pleasures and Still Life are among the haziest Jia films for me, and I didn’t have the time to revisit them before seeing this.

At its core, Caught by the Tides is not merely about the complicated romance between Qiaoqiao—though I actually don’t remember if Zhao Tao’s character’s name is said in dialogue—and Bin (Li Zhubin), despite the general tenor of the critical conversation thus far. Rather, it exemplifies in the best way “a documentary that is progressively overtaken by fiction,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum once characterized Jacques Rivette’s Out 1. Where that legendary masterpiece was conceived as fiction from the outset yet initially presented as detailed vérité, Jia’s method of reusing footage shot over the years, usually during production—I have heard conflicting accounts, though the general consensus is that these are by-and-large not outtakes or alternate takes from Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, but rather moments and scenarios captured on set, with apparently some sequences taken directly from those films—takes that appellation at face value, both in its own conception and in its unfolding.

Then again, that idea might apply better to the Jia referent that, in many ways, feels more apropos to Caught by the Tides than his recent work: the docufiction hybrid 24 City. That film, mostly presented as plain documentary, gradually introduced actors into the mix of factory worker talking heads, including Zhao and Joan Chen, until virtually everything presented on screen was thrown into question. His other best work explicitly invoking documentary, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, was, like Caught by the Tides, co-written by Wan Jiahuan, and involved a similarly intricate structure to 24 City that Caught largely avoids, though these two latest films by Jia share a sense for Chinese historical context and its influence on art. But that film possessed little of the slipperiness that 24 City and Caught present, with the latter film magnifying it to extreme, pervasive proportions.

For much of Caught by the Tides‘s extraordinary achievement rests in the way in which it manages to question every single scene that appears on screen, even as they frequently register with a grand jubilation. After an enigmatic opening shot, the first of many intertitles appears on screen, displaying the lyrics to an unusually (for Jia) raucous rock song, before plunging into an extended, seemingly documentary sequence of Datong villagers singing in a room. Zhao is not present—and indeed does not appear for a while—as Jia lingers on the different impromptu performances. Soon after, there is an extended interview (it sounds like Jia’s voice is asking questions off camera) with a man who is opening an entertainment hall; it becomes clear later that Zhao is one of the women who ends up working as a singer there, but the insertion of this talking head into the proceedings, especially with his brief discussion of a Mao portrait that he recovered while refurbishing the building, throws the already odd focus into complete uncertainty.

Caught by the Tides is, frankly speaking, likely Jia’s most impenetrable film, even as it likely contains the greatest musical spirit of any of his works. It willfully follows its own paths, barreling into the images and sensations of the past without leaving an easily identifiable breadcrumb trail behind. But this comes across as a specific aesthetic strategy, an series of acts of incorporation that, for perhaps the first time since his greatest film Platform, fully emphasizes both the individual and the collective. The Chinese title roughly translates to “romantic generation,” and both it and the English title convey the sweep of history, the way in which an individual moment can suddenly be incorporated into a larger understanding of a people or, indeed, a relationship.

To emulate this idea, Jia’s approach in this first section (and, to a lesser extent in the second) is to only fitfully emphasize Zhao and Li’s connection. One of the Jia films I did see in preparation was “In Public,” his documentary short and first digital effort, shot directly before Unknown Pleasures, and there is a surprising amount in Caught, including a bus converted into a restaurant, as handy a synecdoche for Jia’s reuse of his footage as any. Switching rapidly between Academy ratio to 1.85:1—note that the digital video-shot “In Public” and Unknown Pleasures were both released in the latter ratio—and even incorporating what may or may not be new footage of Zhao (given a notable increase in resolution), the primary sensation is of being unmoored in time, existing somewhere between the immediacy of the past and the nostalgia of the present. In one of the most apparent manifestations of this, frequent Jia actor Liang Jingdong pops up in the 2001-set opening credits, looking much more like his current age, before having a small role in footage clearly shot in 2001. At one point, his character falls asleep in front of a computer, and an animated digital reverie reminiscent of Zhao’s dream in The World adopts a different mood entirely. This first section is full of such ruptures and wonders.

The second section hews closer to what I remember of Zhao and Li’s half of Still Life, but that categorization might not be right at all. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that most of Zhao’s footage is actually taken from the shoot of Ash Is Purest White‘s second section, which somehow recreated Fengjie circa 2005, was shot on 35mm by Éric Gautier, and involved Zhao looking for her partner in that film. There appears to be film grain (assuming it’s not emulated) and the image quality is generally much higher than Li’s scenes, as he was not involved in Ash. While there are fewer cutaways to “purely” uninflected observation of non-actors, the same confusion involved in the first section extends to this questioning of where and when each shot exactly came from, suggesting the understandably discombobulating idea of a woman from 2017 attempting to connect with a man from 2005. At one point, an animated English-language advertisement for robots (allegedly created by AI) plays on a celluloid film projector as Zhao (in I think a 2017-shot café) looks on, only further muddying the waters.

On its face, the third section, set in 2022, provides little of that same uncanniness. The immediate impression is left by the clear aging on Li’s and even (to a significantly lesser extent) Zhao’s faces, as well as the throes of the pandemic. It’s likely that Jia, shooting a year later, had to recreate yet another crisis in China, albeit on a significantly smaller scale and with much less time to be bridged. The narrative intrigue rests mainly in the search for reconnection, but Jia still finds ways to disorient: a few uses of a 360 camera here, stretching and pulling the image; a sublime encounter between Zhao and a serving robot there. But the effect, after seeing all this change and confusion, is to suddenly reorient the viewer, snapping all of the tumult into focus and observing the wreckage left in its wake. Qiaoqiao is on better footing than Bin, but the resignation caused by the intervening 17 years and the mostly unexplained events of that time send the film into another level of inchoate emotion entirely.

To bring it all back to 24 City: while that film was fundamentally grounded in the reality of the factory, even as the viewer’s conception of what constituted it evolved, Caught by the Tides exists in a realm where there is no foundation imposed by the film. It is a film where narrative, both intrinsic to the narrative and informed by the viewer’s expectations, struggles to be born from the “documentary” footage. Zhao’s dialogue-free performance, as luminous as any instance of her legendary work with Jia, acts as a binding agent as always, and it’s worth remembering here that her given name (as mentioned in Mountains May Depart) means waves. Chinese society and Zhao produce their own tides of change, and Caught is, by the end, equally beholden to both of their forces. It is too much to say that the former represents documentary and the latter fiction; indeed, for us Jia devotees Zhao’s face is a primary document of an evolving China. Instead, with regards to a new landmark whose meaning changes with each passing moment, altering both itself and its towering predecessors before it, it’s best to simply marvel at such a bursting work, one whose voice rings out at last with a clear sense of a new beginning.