Acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke floats along the great current of time, history, and memory with Caught by the Tides, a mesmerizing film about the sweep and swirl of life, love, and the relationship between yesterday and today.
Seamlessly blending fiction and non-fiction, archival and original material, and clips from his prior works with newly shot action, the auteur’s latest—arriving in theaters May 9 after heralded showings at last year’s Cannes, Toronto, and New York film festivals—is a hypnotic dream of a movie. Charting the evolution of China over the past 25 years and, with it, his own cinema, it’s a self-reflexive rumination on the national and personal joys, regrets, losses, and advances of a tumultuous quarter-century.
Told with a minimum of dialogue and encased in a mood of wistful melancholy, Caught by the Tides is a film about transition.
In the northern Chinese city of Datong in 2001, Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao, Jia’s long-time leading lady and wife) works as a singer, dancer, and model, earning a living by performing choreographed numbers at nightclubs and walking a runway outside a department store.
Qiaoqiao is involved with Bin (Li Zhubin), who appears to be her agent, and who treats her with a brusqueness that implies underlying tensions. Jia, however, doesn’t explicate the specific nature of their bond, nor their professions; instead, such details are gleaned through fragmentary scenes which, in Datong, are presented in a boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio and are set to rueful pop songs and Giong Lim’s equally poignant score.
Caught by the Tides opens with working-class women sitting around a cramped room singing tunes to each other about youthful amour and leaving sorrows behind in order to focus on the bright future ahead. That positive sentiment is echoed by an outdoor statue of an astronaut blasting off from Earth into cosmic parts unknown, and a sense of movement is furthered by the intermittent appearance and sounds of trains—a favorite Jia motif that accentuates the proceedings’ fixation on full-speed-ahead development.
Barreling forward, however, also entails risks, and the image of Qiaoqiao being harassed by catcalling bikers as she walks with her sweater over her head—another recurring visual in this entrancing pastiche—suggests a need to protect oneself against a coming storm.
Caught by the Tides’ initial third is comprised of snippets from other Jia films, most notably 2002’s Unknown Pleasures, and once Bin disappears and Qiaoqiao goes looking for him, it segues to 2006 Fengjie, the primary setting of the director’s Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner Still Life.
There, Qiaoqiao searches for Bin, sending him text messages that are depicted via silent-movie title cards, and roaming a countryside that’s in the throes of radical transformation. Located upstream from the nearing-completion Three Gorges Dam, Fengjie—like so many communities up and down the Yangtze River—is on the precipice of extinction, its inhabitants preparing to relocate to other locales before their home is literally drowned by rising tides. A veritable ghost town of ruined edifices and displaced souls, it proves a haunting reflection of adrift Qiaoqiao’s loneliness.
Additionally featuring bits and pieces from 2018’s Ash is Purest White, Caught by the Tides’ middle section assumes a wider 1.85:1 form and places equal emphasis on its music to craft a mournful atmosphere.
As in its early going, occasional radio reports provide context for the action at hand, conveying the socio-political and economic shifts of a China undergoing seismic upheaval. Whether it’s long, slow pans across the smudgy faces of workers enjoying a brief respite from toil, electric montages of dance clubs awash in dizzying lights and frenzied commotion, or snapshots of men and women drinking, smoking, and cavorting in private lounges, the film feels attuned to its disparate 21st-century moments, including in Fengjie, where faded newspaper reports about Chinese space travel decorate crumbling walls, and discarded Barbie dolls lie in repose on the rubble-strewn ground.
Qiaoqiao’s quest in Fengjie is a largely futile one marked by casual wandering and a run-in with gangsters who want the money she’s surreptitiously snatched, and whom she fends off with her trusty taser. The former lovers aren’t reunited until 2022, when Bin returns to Datong an elderly man who needs a cane to walk and who’s hopeful that his friend Pan can get him some work.
With the pandemic raging, everyone is in masks and face shields, and that gear contributes to an omnipresent air of disconnection. So too do the strange modern businesses to which old-school Bin is introduced—namely, TikTok, which has made an unlikely star out of senior citizen Xing, whose lip-syncing on-camera performance proves an amusingly dissonant sight. Qiaoqiao is no less alone and unhappy, as evidenced by an encounter with a cheery supermarket robot that inquires, “How are you today?” and, after quoting Mother Teresa and Mark Twain—and asking her to remove her mask—remarks that she appears sad.
Now operating in expansive 2.35:1, Caught by the Tides brings its two protagonists together at a grocery store check-out, but a happily-ever-after isn’t in the cards, and the duo’s stroll along Datong’s busy streets casts them as both together and miles apart. For Jia, the passage of time brings with it only remorse and anguish, with Qiaoqiao remaining silent until the end (save for a soft closing grunt).
In the film’s most heartbreaking moment, Qiaoqiao stares tearfully into Bin’s eyes before gazing over her shoulder at an empty sidewalk—a snow-dappled image that speaks volumes about the heartbreaking futility of looking backwards. Then, she quietly dons glowing armbands, flips her jacket inside-out, and joins the throngs of runners who’ve suddenly materialized on the city’s heretofore-barren streets, reintegrating herself into a stream of humanity.
As a self-aware essay whose construction mirrors and enhances its themes, Caught by the Tides is more challenging than Jia’s dramatic features, and it may strike those unfamiliar with his eminent oeuvre as equally beguiling and baffling. Nonetheless, adventurous cinephiles will find much to savor in this spellbinding rumination on the inevitability of change and the triumphs, turbulence, and tender longing it begets.
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