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Wall Street Journal
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Caught by the Tides' Review: The Ebb and Flow of Love
In 'Caught by the Tides,' veteran director Jia Zhangke contemplates a changing nation, the passage of time and the sting of regret in the form of a leisurely, impressionistic tribute to his wife filmed over the course of more than 20 years. That actress, Zhao Tao, plays Qiaoqiao, who as the film opens is a young singer-actress-model who is struggling to make a living in the north Chinese city of Datong in 2001. Among other gigs, she works in a club, where her boyfriend, Bin (Li Zhubin), is the manager. The pair have an uneasy relationship, yet she seems broken when he proposes to leave town and move to a faraway city to seek his fortune, informing her by text that he'll come retrieve her once he's settled.
Globe and Mail
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Caught in the tides with Jia Zhangke, China's most important filmmaker of the century
Jia Zhangke has earned his reputation as the most important Chinese filmmaker of this century by unblinkingly chronicling the sweeping changes in his country's society. He's depicted its economic upheavals, rapid urbanization and increased globalization – always through the bumpy psychological journeys of characters played by his muse (and wife), Zhao Tao. In Caught by the Tides, which opens in select Canadian cinemas on May 9, Jia continues this exploration in a fascinating fashion: presenting edited footage he shot over the previous 20 years to create a three-party film about displaced lovers. As it leaps from 2001 to 2008 to 2023, the film allows us to witness not only the country, but Zhao herself, mature onscreen. But unlike Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which similarly progresses through time but is otherwise relatively conventional, Jia has made a complex concoction that engages with the possibilities offered by digital cinema, blending documentary footage and outtakes from his previous features (mainly Unknown Pleasures, Still Life and Ash is Purest White). The film concludes with scenes shot during the COVID pandemic, complete with up-to-date smartphones, an elderly TikTok influencer and a scene-stealing robot. Whereas before Jia was capturing history, one could say with Caught by the Tides, he is writing it. Speaking at last year's Cannes, he modestly disavowed any role other than filmmaker. 'I cannot really say that I'm a historian myself. I'm merely a director. But there are many ways to record and to capture, to retain histories; I'm using film as a medium to play my role in doing this.' He said that using two decades of material allowed him to reflect on the political, economic and technological transformations over that period. 'Society is going through an information overload. How can you understand what's going on now without having a long span of time, using an historical perspective to examine where we were and where we are now? Without that, we won't be able to see very clearly the challenges we are dealing with currently.' Jia also described the organic way that the film took shape. 'Starting in 2001 at the infant stage of DV [digital video] filmmaking, while I was shooting, I spontaneously used my camera to capture the spaces that I found very attractive, almost like documentary footage. At the time in China, it was a new era, a new millennium, and we were very excited for what's to come.' But while shooting this documentary footage, he would sometimes include the actors he was working with on a feature film at the time. 'I shot them wandering around or interacting in the cities that I was shooting at the time. And I had a working title: A Man with a Digital Camera. It's paying homage to Dziga Vertov, A Man with a Camera, but I didn't really have a plan.' Not only does COVID appear in the film, it was the impetus for the project itself. Jia's productions were all on pause so he began looking at his old footage. 'I realized that the camera captured things we thought we'd forgotten, but they're the things which made us what we are today.' And then he began to wonder if it could be turned into a film. The result is a sweeping work with more music than dialogue, and a marvel of editing that leans heavily toward abstraction. 'There's so much already embedded in the sounds and images that I thought it would become a distraction to create dialogue in a way that would make something too figurative, too concrete, too simple. It was very intentional to keep it more abstract and lead the audience to observe and somehow interpret the details however they want to.' On the macro level, Jia's new film again revisits familiar political milestones – China's WTO entry, the Beijing Olympics bid, the Three Gorges Dam project – but, as always, looks at these moments through the lives of individuals swept up in the tides of history: Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) and Bin (Li Zhubin), who flit about on the margins of the northern coal mining city of Datong, in Jia's own Shanxi province, until Bin decides to try his luck elsewhere. 'Since this film has transformed itself from A Man with a Digital Camera to Caught by the Tides, I really wanted to start with something more macro,' he explains. 'The tides that I'm trying to portray are firstly the stories of the generations born in the late seventies or early eighties, who experienced this idea of reforming people's desire for freedom, and having a better life going forward. I wanted to start with this collective portrait of a country and then go to the microlevel of how these two characters experience their journeys emotionally, romantically, against the backdrops of societal transformation.' Zhao's astonishing performance ties the film together – often without any spoken lines. In the 2023 section, face obscured by an N95 mask, her eyes do all the talking. And for all the negative impacts of rapid social change – such as the displacement of a million people for the Three Gorges Dam project – Jia locates the positive in Qiaoqiao's personal development. 'Besides her physical transformation, you also see her character's awakening of her female consciousness. In the beginning, she is young, naive, really thinking that her definition of personhood has to rely on her romantic relationship, so much so that she leaves Datong to look for Bin.' Eventually, though, Jia says she learns to rely on herself. 'By the end you see her as an independent, strong female trying to live her own truth, and that is the part of the new 'Western' concept being introduced to China. That's the kind of growth I want to showcase and feature.' Ultimately though, befitting a film that remixes his oeuvre, Caught by the Tides is as much about the man behind the digital camera. Jia sees that, too. 'The footage also captures the emotions that I had throughout these different years of making and capturing these different images and materials. It really documents my own perspective, my own subjectivity.' Special to The Globe and Mail
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Caught by the Tides' Review: Jia Zhangke Sees Constant Flux
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.
Associated Press
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Movie Review: The sweep of history courses through Jia Zhangke's ‘Caught By the Tides'
Jia Zhangke's 'Caught by the Tides' is less than two hours long and yet contains nearly a quarter-century of time's relentless march forward. Few films course with history the way it does in the Chinese master's latest, an epic collage that spans 21 years. Jia undertook the film during the pandemic, assembling a mix of fiction and documentary, including images from his earlier films as well as newly shot scenes. That might sound like a mishmash kind of moviemaking. But for Jia, the preeminent cinematic chronicler of 21st century China, it's a remarkably cohesive, even profound vessel for capturing what has most interested him as a filmmaker: the tidal wave-sized currents of technological progress and social transmutation that wash over a lifetime. The high-speed upheavals of modern China are, of course, a fitting setting for such interests. Jia's films are often most expressed in their surroundings — in vistas of infrastructure that dwarf his protagonists. Fans of Jia will recognize some from his previous films. For me, there's never been a more moving backdrop from him than the rubble and mass displacement of the Three Gorges Dam project (seen here, as in his 2008 film 'Still Life'). 'Caught by the Tides' is ostensibly about Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse) and her lover Bin (Li Zhubin), whom she searches for years after a row sent them in different directions. But in 'Caught by the Tides,' these characters are more like life rafts bobbing in expansive waters, making their way aimlessly. The poetry of 'Caught by the Tides' comes from a grander arc. In one of the film's opening scenes, shot on grainy digital film, women in a Datong city room laugh together, singing old, half-remembered songs. The film's final scenes, set more than two decades later in the southern city of Zhuhai, are more crisply photographed and depict a more impersonal world of smartphones, robots and QR codes. For a moment, Jia even adopts the perspective of a surveillance camera. Another moment: a shot, from pre-digital times, drifting down a street with men looking back at us, smoking and mildly curious. Cut then to what might be the same street years later, where a woman parades as a model in front of a sprawling shopping mall. In 'Caught by the Tides,' these changes go unexplained and unspoken. But the evolutions they chart are deeply familiar to anyone who has lived through even some of these years, in China or elsewhere. We see how people once moved differently, spoke differently and sang differently. Progress and loss exist together as one. Zhao and Li age through the film, leaving them weathered, too, by time. A song late in the film goes: 'I can't grasp the warmth we once shared.' 'Caught by the Tides,' a Sideshow and Janus Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. In Mandarin. Running time: 116 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
