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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
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.
