Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Laer in the show, we’ll talk about the new film “Caught by the Tides” by Jia Zhangke, considered worldwide to be the most important director in China. The film is a unique portrayal of the massive transformation of China over the last 20 years. John Powers will explain – he’s critic at large on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. But first: Trump’s big losses, and big win, in the courts: Erwin Chemerinsky will comment, in a minute.
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Trump had a really bad week in court last week, worse than usual: four major defeats by federal judges and appeals panels. And then this week he had a big victory, although it was a temporary one. For comment, we turned to Erwin Chemerinsky. He’s Dean of the Law School at UC Berkeley, a contributor to The New York Times op-ed page, an author of many books, most recently, No Democracy lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. We reached him today at his office on campus. Erwin, welcome back.
Erwin Chemerinsky: It’s always wonderful to talk with you.
JW: Let’s start with the bad news. On Monday, the Supreme Court lifted the restrictions on random roundups by ICE, in Southern California. A federal judge here had ruled that ICE cannot detain people because they look Latino or speak Spanish and work at unskilled jobs. The court said that was racial profiling, and it was unconstitutional. Tell us about Monday’s ruling – what reasons did the conservative majority give for permitting racial profiling by ICE?
EC: We should start with – the conservative majority didn’t give reasons. There was no opinion or no explanation from the court, and that’s deeply disturbing. One of the six conservative justices, justice Kavanaugh wrote an opinion, but it was just for Justice Kavanaugh. I think we have to begin here by saying that the standard under the Fourth Amendment is that police can stop somebody only if there’s reasonable suspicion that they’ve committed a crime or likely to commit a crime. So ICE can stop somebody only if there’s reasonable suspicion that they’re unlawfully in the United States. Judge Frimpong in Los Angeles in federal court said ICE was stopping people without reasonable suspicion. ICE was stopping people based on four factors. They alluded to their parent race or ethnicity, whether they’re speaking Spanish or English with a Spanish inflicted accent, whether they were working in a job like being a day laborer or an agricultural worker or a painter, and where they were like near a Home Depot or a place where agricultural workers gather. She said in her order that ICE can’t stop people without reasonable suspicion and that ICE can’t use these four completely lawful factors individually or collectively for stops. She wrote a long opinion explaining this. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the government’s request to stay this order. The Ninth Circuit wrote a long opinion explaining it and yesterday, as I said, the Supreme Court without opinion six to three lifted this so ICE can go back to its practice that so clearly violates the Fourth Amendment.
JW: The were fierce dissents from the three liberals. Tell us about their arguments.
EC: Justice Sotmayor wrote the dissent joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, and Justice Sotomayor said the core of the Fourth Amendment is there has to be individualized suspicion that somebody has committed a crime was about to commit a crime. The factors that ICE was using don’t provide individualized suspicion. And she talked about this in human terms, what it means. I was teaching this case this morning, I’m teaching criminal procedure in the Fourth Amendment, and a student spoke up in class and said that she’s from Los Angeles, her father’s a citizen, but he’s Latino and appears Latino. He speaks in heavily accented English. He likes to go to Home Depot for projects. And she said he’s constantly worried he’s going to be stopped by ICE. He doesn’t carry his passport with him. And she then burst into tears in the class. And it’s easy to understand why. I’m so glad that she was willing to speak up because it shows the human dimension of this. It’s not just about words on paper; it’s what it means in people’s lives.
JW: The Supreme Court’s ruling was about the temporary restraining order – that’s only the beginning of this case. It’s in effect until the merits can be ruled on. And I understand I checked with the ACLU of Southern California here this morning. There will be a hearing on a preliminary injunction by the district court on September 24th. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling is certainly ominous, but does it have any bearing on this preliminary injunction?
EC: It does. Let me say what the Supreme Court said is that the District Court’s temporary restraining order is stayed, meaning it can’t go into effect at the end of the litigation. So ICE can, starting today go back to its practice of racial profiling, stopping without individualized suspicion. Now next, the judge will have to decide whether to issue a preliminary injunction, but the judge has to take into account what Justice Kavanaugh said, even though he’s writing just for himself. Do the plaintiffs have standing because they can’t show as likely they’ll be stopped again in the future? Is the – factors that ICE is using enough to meet the standard for reasonable suspicion? Just as Kavanaugh believes they are, the judge is going to take that into account in issuing her ruling.
JW: So this means for those of us who live in LA, the next stage of resistance is community protests, community protecting their neighbors, alert systems, know your rights trainings. LA is well prepared with this. One of the plaintiff’s, CHIRLA is a longtime experienced group at defending immigrant rights. I’m sure you know their work from your time in Los Angeles. So it just means life is going to be a lot harder for people who look Latino, speak with a Spanish accent and work at day jobs, but it’s not the end.
EC: Certainly it’s not the end, but it is an enormously disappointing decision. The Supreme Court really abandons the Fourth Amendment here. What I teach my students in criminal procedure from the first class is that in England there could be general warrants where people could search an entire neighborhood. The core of the Fourth Amendment is individualized suspicion. One of the things that’s disturbing in Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion is he says, ‘the only thing that this is protecting towards the judge’s order are those who are unlawfully in the United States and want to evade being caught.’ That is so fundamentally wrong because everyone, citizen, non-citizen, documented, undocumented, is protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the core of the Fourth Amendment is the police can’t stop any of us without individualized suspicion, and the Supreme Court abandoned that in its ruling.
JW: And let’s just underline the Fourth Amendment, and indeed for all the rights in the Constitution apply to non-citizens as well as citizens of the United States.
EC: And the reason for that is that the Constitution speaks of persons. It says “No person can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. No person can be denied equal protection of the law.” There are some clauses in the Constitution that use the word citizen, but in the First Amendment about speech, the Fourth Amendment about police behavior, it doesn’t use the word citizen. And there’s no dispute that everyone in the United States, documented, undocumented citizen, non-citizen are constitutionally protected by this provision.
JW: Well now let’s talk about last week’s big decisions, all of which were against Trump. Just to run through them briefly, a federal judge in California ruled that it was illegal for Trump to have sent federal troops to Los Angeles. Federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that it was illegal for Trump to have ordered a cutoff of federal funding for Harvard. The court of appeals for the federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. And the panel of judges from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most right-wing court in the country ruled that Trump’s targeting of some Venezuelans for deportation was an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act. Now of course, we all wonder what the Supreme Court will do about these four cases when Trump appeals these rulings, but that depends at least in part on what the rulings actually say about the laws in question. So I’d like to look at them one at a time. Let’s start with Trump sending troops to LA; that according to the court was a violation of Posse Comitatus Act. Please explain what that means.
EC: The Posse Comitatus Act was adopted in 1878 and it makes it a crime to use the United States military for domestic law enforcement. It was adopted after reconstruction. During reconstruction, military troops literally ruled the former rebel states and part of the end of reconstruction was say, no longer can the military be involved in domestic law enforcement. There are very limited exceptions. There’s a strong tradition against the military doing this. Again, there’s notable exceptions. Sometimes governors have requested the military’s presence, Governor Pete Wilson did in 1992 when the riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the officers of beating Rodney King. There are instances where presidents have done so. The last time it was done without a governor’s consent was 1965 when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to protect civil rights demonstrators in Selma. President Eisenhower did so, so as to desegregate the Little Rock schools. What Judge Breyer found in his ruling last week was that President Trump did use the California Guard and Marines for domestic law enforcement in violation of the Posse Act.
JW: Now presumably if it was illegal for Trump to send troops to Los Angeles, it’s equally unlawful for him to send them to Chicago, which, let’s note as of today, Tuesday, he has not done
EC: It is illegal for him to send the troops to Chicago for domestic law enforcement. It’s illegal for the president to use the troops anywhere for domestic law enforcement. DC may be different because DC is a part of the federal government, and he has more authority over the DC guard and we can have that conversation. But I think what Judge Breyer said is clearly right in terms of the law and it would apply whether President Trump is sending them to Los Angeles, they’re sending troops to Chicago or New York or anywhere else. They can’t engage in domestic law enforcement. And we should think about this in the sense the training that police receive is so different than the training that the military receives. Police are trained with regard to how to engage in crowd control. They are trained with regard to the bill of riots. Deadly force is supposed to be the last resort. That’s not how the military is trained, and that’s why we don’t want the military engaging in day-to-day policing.
JW: And then the tariff decision, that ruling was especially significant because this was not a district court judge. This was an appeals court where a clear majority, 7 to 4 ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. Tell us about the tariff ruling.
EC: Actually, it was that the tariffs are illegal much more than they’re unconstitutional. And the reason I emphasize that distinction is President Trump justifies the tariffs under a federal statute and that federal statute does give the president authority in an emergency to regulate importation. It doesn’t mention the word tariffs, and the federal Circuit says when you look at the plain language of the statute where Congress wanted to give the president authority for tariffs. It used the word tariffs. This statute doesn’t do so. Also, the Federal Circuit says, the Supreme Court, the conservative majority has said, that federal agencies can act on major questions of economic or political statements only with clear guidance from Congress. That doesn’t exist here. And if you want to be originalist, the power to tax is given to Congress by Article I, section eight of the Constitution. Tariffs are a form of tax.
And what I think is so interesting about this case is, if the conservative justice remain true to their principles, follow the plain text in interpreting a statute, don’t allow the executive branch to rule on a major question without clear guidance from Congress, follow the original meaning and text of the Constitution. They should come to the same conclusion as the federal Circuit. On the other hand, are they just going to be a rubber stamp for President Trump here as they’ve been in so many areas?
JW: And then there was the decision about Trump’s deportation initiatives where he has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against Venezuelan immigrants he says, our gang members. We’ve always thought the Alien Enemies Act was a terrible law. It’s the one the FDR used in 1942 to in turn Japanese Americans, but the court said Trump cannot use it now against Venezuelans. Please explain that one.
EC: The Alien Enemy Act, as you say, was adopted in 1798 and it says that applies in instances of a declared war or an imminent invasion, and in those circumstances, it gives the president the power to deport ‘males over the age of 14 to their enemy nation.’ President Trump has invoked this to deport Venezuelans. As you say, it’s unprecedented to invoke it in peace time in this way. And what the Fifth Circuit two to one ruled was that the Alien Enemy Act doesn’t apply here. We’re not in a declared war and by—
JW: By Venezuela.
EC: Exactly, nor is there an imminent invasion in terms of how that would be used. The opinion was written by a conservative Republican judge, Leslie Southwick. It was two to one with a Trump appointee writing a just vehement dissent. It almost seemed like he was trying out — Oldham in his dissent — seemed like he was trying out for a Supreme Court appointment with President Trump.
JW: In the Harvard case. The Harvard case is hugely important because Harvard is the only university to challenge Trump in court. Of course, several others have settled or are in negotiations with his Department of Education. Tell us about the Harvard decision.
EC: And I should say there are lawsuits that have been brought on behalf of faculty and researchers, not brought by the university, but Harvard is the one that went to court. And the federal district court judge in Boston ruled in favor of Harvard last week saying that what the Trump administration had done violated the First Amendment.
The government can’t punish speech based on a viewpoint, and what Burroughs found was that the Trump administration cut off grants to Harvard just because of the viewpoints that were expressed and for allowing speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. This enormously important ruling, as with all of the ones we’ve just talked about, the question is will it stand up when it gets to the United States? Supreme Court? District courts in dozens of cases have ruled against the Trump administration so far, but the Supreme Court, almost without exception, is ruled in favor of the Trump administration.
JW: Now, while Harvard is the only institution that has gone to court against Trump, we should emphasize here that Harvard has a great deal of support; 24 top research universities submitted amicus briefs supporting Harvard, including Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, all of the Ivy League except Columbia and Cornell, plus 20 states including California. Does that mean this decision regarding Harvard has any application to their own cases?
EC: If they would bring them, it would. One of the things that’s disturbed me has been the unwillingness of universities to follow what Harvard has done and follow lawsuits challenging against. I believe that the Trump administration target Harvard because it believes if it can force Harvard to capitulate, all of the other universities will fall in line. So when Harvard is litigating, it’s not only for its own sake, it’s the sake of all universities. I’ve been distressed that the University of California has not gone to court even when the Trump administration cut off $583 million to UCLA. There is a lawsuit, but it’s been brought on behalf of faculty and researchers with pro bono counsel. It hasn’t been brought by the University of California.
JW: And I understand you argued that case, again, not for the university, but on behalf of the researchers who brought this lawsuit. Tell us about that case.
EC: The case is Thakur v. Trump. It’s a lawsuit that’s brought on behalf of faculty and researchers to the University of California. It’s being brought by me and some other volunteer lawyers, we’re all doing this pro bono. On June 23rd, the Federal District Court in San Francisco, certified two classes of researchers, one who had lost grants through form letters and another lost grants because they mentioned diversity in some way. The judge found that the former was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act and the latter violated the First Amendment. The government went to the ninth Circuit for a stay of the preliminary injunction. As you mentioned, I did argue that in the ninth Circuit on July 31st, and on August 21st, the ninth Circuit affirmed the district court. So the preliminary injunction remains in place so far it’s in place as to grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Environmental Protection Agency. We’ve moved to expand this to include grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation, and that’ll be argued in district court a week from Thursday, September 18th.
JW: In addition to cutting research funds to the University of California, Trump has also, in his words, fined the University of California for a billion dollars as a punishment for antisemitism on campus. My first reaction was, why a billion? Why not a trillion? If you were really serious about stopping antisemitism, why let him off the hook for a billion dollars?
EC: He hasn’t sued yet. He has said he would settle with the University of California for a billion dollars. You’re right, of course, it’s an arbitrary number. It’s a number to shock. He cut off, of course, $2 billion in funding from Harvard. So at least you see where the number is coming from. What I want to emphasize is how illegal it is for the Trump administration to cut up funds on that basis. Universities that receive federal funds have to meet Title VI. This is Title VI of Civil Rights Act that says they can’t discriminate on the base of race or ethnicity. But in order to cut off funds to a university for violating Title VI, there has to be advanced notice and a hearing. There has to be findings of fact that the university violated Title VI. There has to be, before any funds are cut off, a 30 day notice to both the House and the Senate of th Congress. There hs to be the opportunity of the university to rectify. And funds can be cut off only as to the part of the program that’s deemed to violate Title VI. The Trump administration has met none of those requirements and has even tried to do so.
JW: So how do you understand the University of California, which in this case means the Regents and the president deciding to try to negotiate a settlement with Trump rather than going to court to challenge what is obviously a denial of due process and a violation of the law, especially after Governor Newsom said, “We’ll sue.”
EC: Let me say, I have no inside information here. I don’t speak to the Regents about it, so I know nothing about negotiations except what’s been in the news. There was a front-page story and The Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago that talked about 10 Regents engaged in negotiations with Trump.
Keep in mind that under the California Constitution, the Regents govern the University of California. Gavin Newsom is an ex officio member of the Board of Regents, but he doesn’t control what the Regents do, so the Regents would have the authority to settle, but I hope so much that they don’t settle. The reality is if they do, every penny, if it’s a billion dollars, that that billion dollars whatever not is coming from the instructional and research mission of the university. The university has done nothing wrong and therefore shouldn’t be paying penalties. There’s been no semblance of due process. And if the university capitulates now, what’s to stop Trump from extorting money from it again next year? Certainly it can’t be good faith that Trump won’t go after the university again, and so I believe strongly that the university should do what Harvard did, file a lawsuit, challenging the Trump administration in court. It may lose that lawsuit, but it has no chance unless it tries.
JW: Erwin Chemerinsky — he’s Dean of the Law School at Berkeley. Erwin, thank you for everything you do – and thanks for talking with us today.
EC: Thank you. Truly my pleasure.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about an amazing new movie from China: “Caught by the Tides.” When I watched it, I didn’t know anything about it, or about its director Jia Zhangke, except that it was about a woman searching for a lost lover for 20 years against the background of China’s transformation by the forces of capitalism. I found it mesmerizing. I’d never seen anything like it. For one thing, there’s almost no dialogue for almost two hours, and at the end I still didn’t really know what it was. And so, I thought we’ve got to talk to John Powers and find out about this. John Powers, of course, is the former longtime critic for Vogue and longtime critic for Terry Gross’s Fresh Air on NPR. John Powers, what is this movie?
John Powers: It is a movie by the person who I think is widely thought worldwide to be the most important director in China. And over the last 30 years, his great project has been to tell stories or loose versions of stories that show the transformation of Chinese life in towns and villages and show how it’s been transformed radically by both capitalism and by the state, capitalism run by the Communist Party. And so this particular film brings together footage he’s been shooting over the last 25 years. So the film begins in the city of Datong with the two characters that you mentioned, and more or less it’s showing life in Datong. Then the characters split up and they moved to the Three Gorges area, which maybe some of our listeners know was flooded by the party in a huge damn thing, displacing millions of people. And you follow that for a while and then you cut forward to the present, or at least the present of Covid, and you follow these lovers again. So you see basically three different times of Chinese history and life. But of course the interesting thing is he actually was shooting those things in 2000 and 2006 and during Covid. So in a way it is been compared sometimes to that Richard Linkletter film “Boyhood” where you actually are showing real people and their physical transformation through time, even as you’re watching China’s physical transformation and historical transformation through time.
JW: Justin Chang wrote about it at length for The New Yorker. First, he called it a feature length collage kind of archival documentary that becomes an archival drama. You think that’s a good way to think about it?
JP: It doesn’t make it seem very alluring, does it? Justin and I have talked about this film a lot, so it’s not quite archival, but I would think it’s more kind of a docudrama, which as you get closer to the present, the characters emerge more fully because in fact, the footage that you see from 2000 really isn’t footage that he thought was going to be purposed for this film. So he’s managed to cut together stuff from earlier films to make these characters seem like characters. They’re a bit more together when you get to the Three Gorges part, and by the end, it’s clearly been written purposed for this. So it’s like a documentary that transforms into a romantic story of a kind.
JW: Well, the film starts in an earlier era, a communist era, and the first long scene is a group of women peasants in some kind of a celebration. I dunno, maybe it’s I imagine something like International Women’s Day and they’re taking turns, singing, laughing, really having fun, no men involved. There’s a lot of singing and dancing in this movie, but this is pretty much the last singing that is truly happy.
JP: Yes, and it’s the last singing that’s truly self-generated because when you’re watching the film, you have to realize that in some sense the whole thing is hugely metaphorical. So when you begin the movie with a kind of China that doesn’t exist anymore, where people sit around on holiday things and sing to one another and laugh happily, the next time you see singing and dancing, people are doing it commercially that the heroine is actually singing in public to promote products. By the end of the film, nobody’s singing really, in fact. And you go from a room of these women who know one another and they’re all singing happily to the heroine, essentially being from great stretches on her own in an almost completely barren city. At the end, she does wind up running with a group of people, but once again, that’s just hustling into the future and physical fitness rather than the joy.
So the whole movement of the film, which and I think is a political statement in its way, is from a culture that was alive and healthy to one that through the miracle of growth, which is both party growth and capitalist growth, leaves everybody completely alienated, but in a much richer surrounding because the other part that has to be mentioned is that the women are singing in this ratty little room, and by the end you’re in the city that looks so kind of crummy at the beginning of the film when shot in 2000 and it’s now wide streets with McDonald’s and beautiful buildings and it looks like a rich city. And at the beginning it looked like a poor city, but the people seem more impoverished psychologically and spiritually than they were at the beginning.
JW: The sequence that took my breath away comes close to the beginning. It’s a shot of a miserable landscape, an empty field of dead grass with a wall of rundown low apartment buildings in the distance, and the radio is playing on the soundtrack. And the radio we learned from the subtitle says, “China has joined the WTO.”
JW: We know what that means. That means this sad rundown town is going to become this city of high-rise condos with hundreds of apartment buildings and millions of people living in them. I want to quote Justin Chang again because he has a very good line about this. He says, “the director likes to tug your attention sideways away from the fictional foreground and toward the nonfictional background where he suggests the real story often lies.”
JP: And in fact, that’s what he does. The title, just the English title, which is when you’re ‘Caught by the Tides,’ it’s history that’s pulling you. And all of his films show this. So it’s often the case in his films, especially the early films. The story is kind of wafer thin, but you’re using the story as a way of showing the world. And one of the things that’s fantastic and will make his films invaluable for probably millennia is that he’s a person who’s out there showing you what these things look like. In the sequence, in the Three Gorges I was watching with a friend and she was saying, you never see a thing where you watch people knocking apart old buildings because the water’s going to come flooding in. They’re trying to save the bricks. So you watch the labor of what it actually means to have these people do the stuff. And the story almost doesn’t matter at all. It’s what you’re seeing of the world that matters with him. And he is very good at always showing you that the place seems richer, and he’s always good at showing you that somehow that something huge has been lost without ever being really explicit about it, which is I think one of his skills. He is not a guy who hammers you with the idea.
JW: So right after this WTO announcement, our hero visits an abandoned auditorium with a sign outside that says, “Workers’ Cultural Palace.” And we learned this is going to be fixed up. It’s a wreck, but they’re going to fix it up for retired coal miners we’re told. So they can see live performances of what they call ‘opera,’ and there’s giant characters on the wall of this wrecked building, and we’re told it says ‘Music, Song, Dance, Tea, a taste of the world’s beauty.’ Now there’s nothing beautiful about this place. It is a wreck. And then we see the show that they put on there, and it’s a kind of a pathetic show and the miners look pretty miserable. So unlike the first scene where the peasant women by themselves in this little cold room are singing happily, this is a pretty miserable scene of the life at the workers’ cultural palace in old China.
JP: Yes. One more detail is that the guy, as he’s standing by the thing of Chairman Mao, it’s also the new China because in order to sing there and get your tips for singing there, you have to pay to be one of the singers. You paid seven yuan, then they split the take at the end of the evening, and ideally, you’ve made some money by doing it, which is very far from singing joyfully to your friends and everybody’s laughing and having a good time. It is now a kind of depressing business.
JW: Our protagonist, this beautiful woman, spends the entire nearly two-hour movie looking for this lover from the original scene. He is not a very appealing guy, and it’s kind of hard to understand why she devotes her life to longing for him and searching for him. He’s not very nice to her. He is kind of a low-level crook. This was a puzzle to me.
JP: Well, it is not a problem with the film, but it’s a problem when you were trying to cobble together old footage of people of a certain age. You don’t have the scenes where you see them ever be happy. So you think if you had even one scene of them being ecstatic and then her wanting to recapture, that would make sense. The first time she sees him, she tries to kiss him, and he pulls away, and that’s almost as intimate as they get. And he’s kind of an agent, not a pimp because he’s not a prostitute, but he’s kind of her boss in a way. Then he leaves going off for greener horizons and says he’ll get in touch with her, which of course he doesn’t because in fact, he’s a low-level crook and she does follow him. The characters in his movies are often like McGuffins, to use the old Hitchcock phrase, is that you’re thinking you’re following them, but that’s actually not the story. These are the people caught by the tides. And in fact, the story is about the tides. That’s not a story about the people who are caught. He’s made some films and I would recommend them to listeners where he tries to be more narrative and in fact is more narrative. I don’t think it’s his greatest gift, but there’s one called “The Touch of Sin” from 2013, which does some of the same things. There’s a great one I also recommend called “The World.” It features the same actress who he met in 2002 and eventually married, and she’s been the star of every one of his movies ever since. But in the world, it’s about these young people who are working at this mock theme park of the world’s great places with an Eiffel Tower and big band and all the rest.
And it’s about the gap between their daily lives and the fantasy of the world that they service. And that’s more narrative. “Touch of Sin” is narrative. Narrative isn’t his strength, but when he does it, the points become clearer, and the films feel more overtly political. He’s an interesting guy because people wonder, how can you make these movies in China? It’s a peculiar thing because he’s gotten away with it when other people have gotten in trouble, and it may be because he’s clever, he actually served as a deputy into the party Congress for a years after he was famous. I think he was chosen. I’ve read some Chinese commentators saying this movie’s less overtly political, and they’re speculating: ‘Is that because he either has been bought off by being in the party Congress or having been in the party Congress during the Xi era? You’re just dispirited because you realize there’s nothing you can do.’ In any case, every person I know from the West who’s seen this movie thinks, ‘oh, this is obviously a harsh judgment on what’s been going on in China.’
JW: That’s what I thought.
JP: Yeah, but sometimes in some of his other films, he’s more overt about specific political things about corruption, say, he just shows it to you. Here, he doesn’t do that so much. There’s a little bit of it, but it’s a huge metaphor for what looks like people being caught by society success and people not that famous line, I can’t remember who it was, I think one of the generals in Brazil was, I can’t remember which one it was, who famously said, “the economy is doing well, the people not so well.” And although there are a lot of unemployed people in this film, you do have the sense that externally, the city looks like it’s doing so great. Why is it such an incredibly lonely movie?
JW: Yeah, our protagonist we follow for almost two hours has a beautiful face that’s mesmerizing on screen. She never says a word. Does That matter?
JP: I think it’s clearly a choice. I think among things, it means that you’re trying not to make it a psychological film, and you’re making it a less personal film or less personal about them, and she becomes a more emblematic figure as soon as she starts talking, she’s going to want specific things. Whereas in fact, what he realizes in this film, I’ve seen her in scads of his movies, I think this is the best and most expressive she’s ever been. But she’s great in the film. I don’t mean that as a criticism of the other stuff. She’s really good, and she can actually carry this movie with her face, and you don’t need to know specifically what she’s thinking — she might be thinking, ‘oh, I want a coffee.’ But in fact, in the larger sense, you know exactly what she’s feeling and what she’s thinking.
JW: So after witnessing these monumental world historical transformations of China that’s going on for the 20 years of this film, eventually there is this kind of happy ending of sorts to the story. She finds her old lover who she’s been searching for, and at the end, they’re both back in their hometown, which as you say, has been transformed into this neon high-rise consumer paradise. She’s working as a supermarket cashier and seems okay. He is clearly in bad health. He’s unemployed, he’s not in good shape. They meet on a street corner at night. And the last scene, you mentioned this, she reaches into her backpack and puts these lights on her arms, which we sort of say, what is she doing?
JW: Then a huge crowd of joggers runs by, and she runs into the street and joins them, leaving the lover behind. And the last shot is the glowing lights of these hundreds of runners in this dark city, a really gorgeous shot to end the movie, but what are we supposed to take away from this? Justin Chang said, you feel her stubborn determined refusal to let the world pass her by. But another way of looking at it is she’s running away from him, finally.
JP: Those two fit together, she clearly is leaving him behind. They’re finally together, and she realizes, I mean, she’s broken up with him before, but she doesn’t want him. And that past part is completely dead. But you’re joining this crowd of people who are running as the response to sitting around with your friends singing. You’re in an anonymous crowd of runners, and it’s hustling. It’s not exuberant play, even though she’s being strong and forceful and making herself strong by running as a person who ran for years and years, it was never the same to me as playing basketball with a friend. There’s a fitness aspect and you got to keep going. And all of that I think is contained in that, is that she is indomitable in a way, and he’s used her in almost every movie as the figure of the indomitable side. Usually the male side is shifty and unreliable in one way or another, or not strong enough to hold up to the change.
And nearly always it’s women who actually are strong enough to handle what’s going on. So there’s that part of it. And so he’s left there in bad health. They kind of look the same age at the beginning. By the end, he looks a lot older than she does. His health doesn’t seem good. He couldn’t run if he wanted to. So there’s a weird affirmation, but it doesn’t seem so positive because you’re still running in a crowd of people and through an empty street, which is kind of alienated in its way, I think. So the movement is away from community toward alienation, away from poverty, toward enough financial wealth that our heroine can have a wonderful scene, I think with a robot in the grocery store, a charming robot, in fact, that’s kind of fun. But you also realize that that’s one of the deepest connections she has in the entire film. When you see a scene of being with somebody is being with a robot rather than being with people.
JW: The film is “Caught in the Tides.” You can see that on the Criterion Channel. John Powers, thanks for talking with us today.
JP: Oh, sure. And may I just say, really, this is a filmmaker, if you don’t know, it’s well worth seeing a lot of his films because he is charting something that nobody else in the world has charted in the way he has.
