Spank's LFF Diary, Sunday 13/10/2024

Reviewed today: Caught By The Tides, The Talk Of The Town.

12.15pm: The Talk Of The Town [clip]

Robin Baker knows it, just like Clyde Jeavons knew it before him: watching a restoration of an old movie is a lovely way to spend an LFF Sunday afternoon. Baker’s introduction to today’s archive selection is entertaining and informative as usual, pointing out that its basically meaningless title was chosen in an audience vote, and his preferred choice from the options provided would have been The Gentlemen Misbehave. He also notes that considering the talent on either side of the camera, it’s a film that’s been surprisingly forgotten about since its release in 1942, possibly because it’s tricky to pin down what it is.

Director George Stevens hits the ground running here, cramming an entire film’s worth of setup into a montage lasting just a few minutes. By the end of it we know that Leopold Dilg (Gregory Peck) has been jailed for burning down a wool mill and killing one of the workers inside it, but he insists he’s innocent. He breaks out of jail and hides out in the house of former high school sweetheart Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur). Which is a problem, because that house is just about to be let out to law professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman) for the summer. Dilg passes himself off as the gardener of the house, but that’s a ruse that can only succeed for so long, particularly with his face all over the front of the papers.

Baker's right: it's a hard film to categorise. It's primarily a screwball comedy, with all the farcical deceptions you’d expect of the genre, but it's also based around a murder/arson case and the ensuing capital trial. When the two male characters aren’t flirting with Nora, they’re engaging in theatrical philosophical debates about the law, and when it’s morally right to ignore it.  On top of that, you've got a subplot about civic corruption and the rule of the mob that feels eerily appropriate to America even now.

It’s a heady mixture of lightness and dark, and the most miraculous thing is that you’re never aware of the gear changes: everything runs smooth as silk from beginning to end, thanks to Stevens' pacy direction and the talents of his leading trio. And that includes the central dilemma of which man Nora will end up with, which Stevens and his writers delay resolving until the last possible moment. You know that if they’d filmed this pre-Code, she wouldn’t have had to make the choice in the first place. They knew what they were doing when they offered The Gentlemen Misbehave as an alternative title.

5.55pm: Caught By The Tides [clip]

Jia Zhangke is in the building, something that I don't think has happened at the LFF since 2000. I wasn’t expecting that, but it looks like all the Chinese people at this screening are, because as soon as Jonathan Romney comes on stage to start making introductions they’ve all got their cameras out. It’s a good thing that Jia’s here too, because his description of how his new film was made makes sense of what’s about to come.

In 2001, just after that panel discussion he attended at the LFF, Jia started a project to shoot lots of things with his digital camera - mainly events where groups of people come together - to see if they would eventually coalesce into a film. He planned to do this for two years maximum, but he realised at the end of that period that he hadn’t found a reason to stop filming. So he carried on. It wasn't until 2022 that he decided to stop and see how his footage could be cut together. He'd gathered quite a bit by then.

What he ends up with is a story in three chapters.  It starts in 2001, with Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) making a living from dancing at corporate events, and putting up with the constant abuse of her boyfriend Bin (Li Zhubin). Eventually it’s Bin who walks out of the relationship, promising to get back in touch once he’s found a better place for them to live. Cut to 2006, when Bin is embroiled in some dodgy dealings based around a dam construction project, while Qiaoqiao is on a journey trying to track him down. Finally, cut to 2022...

When we first see Qiaoqiao in her magnificent wig, I thought ‘oh, that’s clever, Zhao Tao’s playing her character from Unknown Pleasures again'. In fact, it’s more complex than that: Jia has reused footage he shot from Unknown Pleasures (along with some of his other movies) and cut it into this film to give his two main characters a bit more backstory. This means that over the duration of Caught By The Tides, we get to see both Qiaoqiao and Bin aging a couple of decades without the use of prosthetics or CGI.

And to be fair, the same could be said for China itself. On the surface Caught By The Tides is a love story, but it's also a depiction of how China has changed since 2001. At the start, the country's on a high, having just secured membership of the WTO and the 2008 Olympics: twenty years later, Covid has brought it back down again. The dodgy business scams Bin pulls off in his early years don’t exist any more: now his peers are making money through TikTok. Qiaoqiao starts the film with the most basic mobile phone you’ve ever seen, but by the end she’s having conversations with a robot.

The ways in which people interact socially – the sort of events that Jia started filming back in 2001 – have changed completely. Ultimately, these become his key to telling a story that he filmed for 21 years without really knowing what that story would be, and are a crucial part of what makes this a vivid historical document of two decades in the life of a country. (Some parts of the final chapter already feel, at this remove, a bit like an early example of pandemic-era nostalgia: "Hey, remember when we used to have to scan QR codes to get into public buildings?") Most breathtaking of all, it's a story Jia tells with very little dialogue, unless it’s absolutely needed to set up a particular plot point. The very last spoken word in the film is a terrific punchline.