37/14
The Chinese woman lives her life in silence, celebrating the flourishing Belle Époque with song and dance. The heroine has no lines of dialogue throughout the film. Have you ever bought an album from a band and discovered that it’s not new songs, but old B-sides, remixes, and a few new songs for added value? If you’re over thirty-five, of course. Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Pill” is in many ways exactly that. But in doing so, he makes a statement about his career and, indeed, the changing face of the world around him. Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) is in love with a woman named Guo Bing (Zhubin Li), but he moves on, and Qiao Qiao follows him. She follows him over the years and across the country. But once she gets to her destination, maybe what she wants isn’t hers. But the plot doesn’t really matter, because much of the above has already been written and filmed over the years; it’s just reused. Excerpts from “Unknown Pleasures” (2002), “Still Life” (2006), and “Mountains Can Move” (2015), if I remember correctly. This allows for a realistic depiction of the two main characters over time and their uneven aging. As a result, the scenes are distinct but very familiar, serving as a kind of retrospective of Gia’s work in a more direct and well-executed way than Takeshi Kitano’s attempt with “Takeshis” (2005). The problem with making a film this way is that while it works perfectly as a narrative film, throwing in what you already have makes it a bit clumsy in terms of flow. It feels more like a series of vignettes than a well-constructed piece of work. Watching multiple films, with the incomplete footage taken from them, resembles the original plot, so it doesn’t feel like one story, but rather multiple stories strung together. But there are beautiful coincidences that materialize and allow Jia’s message to get through. Text messages on an old Nokia become TikTok videos on a newer smartphone. Jia is very ironic about his approach to technology. TikTok fame is more about cheap advertising than actual fame and fortune; and service bots can easily be mistaken for simple questions. Technology has played an interesting role in defining the nature of human relationships, especially over the past twenty years. If you know Jia’s work, you’ll immediately recognize what’s going on here. But if you approach his work with a bit of freshness, this film can seem a bit odd, not quite coming together. Some scenes don’t seem to quite fit together, others were added as they became available. So it may take some legwork for the uninitiated, and that’s a plus for longtime fans. Although they may feel like they’re watching “The Still Life” all over again. Has life changed in the last eighteen years? Politic1983.home.blog.