Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (Jia Zhangke, 2020) (Patreon)

Even in a year where there's no Cannes, and new films of any kind are few and far between, there's been relatively little fanfare for this sparkling new documentary from Jia Zhangke, which perhaps indicates the extent to which we've come to take this master filmmaker for granted. In a somewhat unexpected turn, Jia has taken his recent style -- more polished, arguably more commercial -- and applied it to his interests in nonfiction. In its crisp framing, vibrant use of color, and audience-friendly pacing, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue actually has more in common with A Touch of Sin and Ash is Purest White than with earlier docs like Useless or even I Wish I Knew.

Deborah Young's review in the Hollywood Reporter claims that non-Chinese viewers will have a hard time with this film due to lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but I respectfully disagree. While I am a Jia fan and a reasonably intelligent person (I know what the Cultural Revolution was), my knowledge of 20th and 21st century Chinese literature is very limited. Of current writers, I probably would have only been able to name Nobel laureate Mo Yan prior to watching this film, and it's noteworthy the degree to which Jia minimizes him here. (He appears for all of 10 seconds, one of dozens of speakers at the Shangxi Literary Conference.) 

The purpose of Swimming Out, aside from profiling the Shangxi conference for which Jia is a major organizer, is to examine a very specific thread in Chinese literary modernity. Jia, himself "a guy from Fenyang" as the recent documentary profile put it, is interested in writers who zeroed in on the rural experience, especially during the Cultural Revolution. While focusing on the influence of the provincial writer Ma Feng, Jia then interviews three major contemporary writers who followed in his footsteps, remaining in small-town rural China and documenting life there. 

Jia Pingwa discusses his struggles as the son of a "counterrevolutionary." (His father was a bureaucrat forced to pay fealty to Chiang Kai-shek just before the revolution.) Forever thwarted in his ambitions, Jia eventually found his voice as a writer while being "sent down" to the countryside. Yu Hua, best known for his novel To Live (adapted, of course, into the classic film by Zhang Yimou), describes the sudden shift in his world when the literary establishment accepted him and he became an "official" state writer. And Liang Hong explains how her memories of her mother helped shape her perspective on the daily rituals of rural life.

Jia breaks Swimming up into short chapters, which seems like an effort to make the film come across as more formalist than it actually is. The chapter breaks feel arbitrary, and distract from the fact that this is, in fact, a very straightforward introduction to current issues in the Chinese literary world. When we consider the frustrating insularity of Anglophone literature in general, and especially when it comes to Asian writing in particular, such a film would be a boon in any case. One could typically see Icarus Films pick it up and add it to their catalog as a teaching aid. The fact that Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue was made by Jia Zhangke means that it exhibits a luminosity and seductiveness that, in this context, is practically a bonus.