‘Caught by the Tides' Review: Jia Zhangke Sees Constant Flux

New York Times

08-05-2025

In 'Caught by the Tides,' the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke tracks a woman, a couple and a country across two tumultuous, transformational decades. As emotionally effective as it is formally brilliant, it draws on a trove of material — both fiction and nonfiction — that Jia began shooting in 2001 while working on another movie. He continued to document a dizzyingly changing China, a heroic project that has finally resulted in 'Caught by the Tides,' a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.
Jia has directed more than a dozen feature-length movies since his 1997 drama 'Pickpocket,' about a low-level thief, but the impoverished state of foreign-language distribution in the United States means that his work tends to quickly slip in and out of art houses here before heading to living rooms. He's a rock star on the international festival circuit, however, and a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, where his movies regularly screen in competition. Jia won the best screenplay award at Cannes for his 2013 masterpiece 'A Touch of Sin,' but he tends to be overlooked by juries because while his movies aren't difficult, they don't offer obvious pleasures. They're thoughtful, and they need to be watched thoughtfully in turn.
That's true of 'Caught by the Tides,' which follows a character who's been featured in some of Jia's earlier features, Qiaoqiao — Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and longtime star — a willowy stunner with sharply planed cheekbones and a steady, penetrating gaze. That gaze is especially crucial here because while Zhao's star charisma immediately commands your attention, her character never says a word. Instead, Qiaoqiao texts and she watches, observing the world and the people in it with eyes that, at times, flash with amusement and anger. When she's with lover, Bin (Li Zhubin), her eyes also pool with tears that he doesn't deserve.
Zhao is a sensitive, subtly expressive screen performer who can convey a world of feeling with a single look. Even so, a heroine who can speak but doesn't could have been risky for Jia because her silence could drain the character of complexity and, importantly, a sense of female agency. Here, though, everything that needs to be said is said both in bits of conversation that fill in the elliptical story and in the many documentary passages, which makes her a stand-in for Jia. Bin, a small-time hood more interested in money than in Qiaoqiao, does speak, yet his words are invariably less eloquent than her (and Jia's) quiet.
The story, such as it is, opens in the northern city of Datong and emerges gradually without the usual filmmaking preamble and prompts. If Jia has ever read a screenwriting manual, he probably immediately tossed it, laughing. His work fits more readily into art-cinema traditions than those of Hollywood, but is nevertheless insistently nonprogrammatic. 'Caught by the Tides' takes place over some 20 years that, contrary to convention, aren't shaped into neatly defined three (four or five) acts. Instead, time in the movie flows, just as in life. One minute, Qiaoqiao is young and has a bob and bangs; in the next she's clearly older, and appears more inwardly directed, her now-long hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Qiao and Bin's emotionally fraught romance winds throughout 'Caught by the Tides,' but the movie's heart and its obvious sympathies are more with her than with him. About a half-hour into the movie, she appears one night watching a joyful, raucous crowd flooding the street. It's 2001, and China has just been named as the host of the 2008 summer Olympics. ('China won!') The country is on the move, and Qiaoqiao soon will be too. Shortly thereafter, Bin splits to pursue a business venture elsewhere, and she follows. She'll keep on following him for the remainder of the movie amid national milestones, more crowds, dramatic turns, many songs and a multitude of young and old, unlined and weathered faces.
It's never clear what Qiaoqiao sees in Bin other than his careless, near-sullen inattention toward her, which, of course, can be exceedingly potent romantic catnip. Whatever the reason, she is drawn to him despite his schemes and roving eye. The first time they appear together in a scene is at a club where she finds him cozily sitting side by side with a woman who's wearing the kind of chalk-white makeup, elaborate headdress and costume worn in traditional Chinese opera. The differences between that woman and the casually up-to-date Qiaoqiao — emblems of the old and new China — couldn't be more striking. Just as notable is how Bin treats Qiaoqiao, whom he brusquely tells to sit, gesturing toward a seat opposite him.
Viewers who've seen Jia's drama 'Unknown Pleasures' (2002) might wonder if they're experiencing déjà vu while watching this scene. That's because in the first two-thirds of 'Caught,' Jia has drawn from material that he shot years earlier, including alternate takes from some of his older movies, notably 'Pleasures' and 'Ash Is Purest White' (2019), in which Zhao's characters have the same name. This creates a startling continuity because in 'Caught,' you're watching not just characters age in a few hours but also the actors playing them, changes that mirror the accelerated pace of China's embrace of capitalism. The country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 (the year that 'Caught' opens), and is now the world's second biggest economy.
Few filmmakers blend the personal and the political, the micro and macro, as brilliantly as Jia does. In movie after movie, he doesn't gesture at the larger forces affecting his character's lives, say, with a brief shot of someone wincing at a news report on TV. For Jia, China and, perhaps more rightly, all the many (many!) other men and women in 'Caught in the Tides' are much like Qiaoqiao and Bin, characters in a larger story. Again and again, Jia cuts from the lovers to images of other people dancing, talking, singing and restlessly, insistently moving forward as they keep pace (or try to) with their rapidly moving country.
Early on in 'Caught by the Tides,' there's a short scene that shows several dozen men of differing ages seated on some stone steps outside a building. They're humbly dressed, mostly in muted colors. A few look old enough to have been alive when Mao Zedong was in power, and it's hard not to wonder at the seismic changes they've seen and endured. Not long after, there's a cut to Qiaoqiao walking along railway tracks with her back toward the camera. She soon passes a group of miners headed in the opposite direction. Datong is a coal city, and while miners like these have helped turn China into a powerhouse, Jia's focus remains on Qiaoqiao, who's resolutely headed into the future.