Leo Goldsmith
In his latest blend of fiction and nonfiction, Jia Zhangke crafts a story of wayward lovers out of scenes from his prior films
combined with new footage.
Zhao Tao as Qiaoqiao and Li Zhubin as Guo Bin in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
Caught by the Tides, directed by Jia Zhangke,
now playing in theaters
• • •
Cinema abounds with examples of collaborations between actors and directors that span many films and decades: Chishu Ryu and Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Pierre Léaud and François Truffaut, Alex Descas and Claire Denis. In each case, there is a sense of both comfort and proleptic grief: the director’s satisfaction of reuniting once again with an old friend as well as their desire to delay time’s flow. When asked about working with Lee Kang-sheng in multiple film projects over more than thirty years, the director Tsai Ming-liang said he felt he discovered that the true purpose of cinema was to observe the minute changes in his actor’s face over time: “They reveal the truth of life ceaselessly.”
Zhao Tao as Qiaoqiao in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
Zhao Tao has been Jia Zhangke’s romantic and creative partner since 2000’s Platform. In the quarter century that has followed, Zhao’s cherubic smile and poised, somewhat inscrutable demeanor have graced nearly all of Jia’s films, whether feature-length or short, narrative or documentary, or genres in between. She is once again the protagonist in Jia’s new film, Caught by the Tides, an inventive and quietly affecting reverie that combines reconstituted images from a number of the director’s previous projects with more recent footage to craft a new narrative. Partly an archival remix of the director’s own output, the film also functions as a kind of home movie tracking his career as a filmmaker and the aging of his wife and star over the past two-plus decades.
Li Zhubin as Guo Bin in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
It’s a critical commonplace that Jia’s filmography serves as an unofficial record of the social and economic transformations of China during the past thirty years. Jia cunningly blends fiction and nonfiction in nearly all of his films, and Caught by the Tides is among the most elaborate of these hybrids, once again setting the ups and downs of love amid social and economic change, with stars and nonactors sharing the same frame. Along with its newly shot coda, Caught by the Tides makes use of footage (sometimes outtakes, sometimes whole scenes) from several prior works, including Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006), and Ash Is Purest White (2018). Out of this material, Jia crafts the story of two wayward lovers—Qiaoqiao (Zhao) and Guo Bin (played by another Jia mainstay, Li Zhubin)—from their early relationship in the mining town of Datong, located in Shanxi (Jia’s home province), to an episode in Three Gorges on the Yangtze River, to a COVID-era reunion back in Datong.
Zhao Tao as Qiaoqiao in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
Looming in the background of these films is the Chinese Communist Party, its legal system, its distinctive incorporation (and mutations) of capitalism, and the top-down pressure it exerts on every facet of daily life. While his early career is closely identified with Chinese independent cinema, and thus unsanctioned by the CCP, Jia has for some years counted President Xi Jinping among his fans. That Jia’s work tends to take love against the backdrop of history’s sweep as its subject perhaps makes him a more natural candidate for official chronicler of China’s recent past. Certainly, his films are by no means mere propaganda: his latest features glimpses of protest from citizens forcibly displaced and images that suggest vast disparities between a gangsterish wealthy capitalist class and those uprooted in pursuit of employment. Nonetheless, Jia’s films—with their lovelorn protagonists and melancholic longueurs—are far more assimilable to the Party’s sense of nationalism than, say, his close contemporary Wang Bing, whose incisive and unsparing documentation of labor in contemporary China has been met with precisely the opposite of an official endorsement. The very title of Jia’s new film suggests that the social transformation to which its characters are subject is something akin to a natural force that one must simply submit to rather than an artificial system against which one might mount an active resistance.
Li Zhubin as Guo Bin in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
Yet there remains a quietly subversive element in Jia’s films, particularly in how they contrast the nation’s grand historical narrative with the more quotidian details of those swept up in its drift. Thus, in the movie’s middle section, Jia returns to his footage from Still Life to frame the Three Gorges Dam—a massive project to expand the shipping capacity of the Yangtze River that displaced more than a million people—as a story of brutal forced migration and large-scale erasure. Other events—including celebrations for the nation’s successful bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, or the country’s highly regimented response to COVID (complete with a little dig at the corresponding dysfunction in the United States)—serve as markers that situate more vivid images capturing the mundane and micro-historical. Grainy DV footage shows a rave and an entertainer lifting heavy objects clipped to his eyelids; a child’s rubber boot and discarded Barbie lie in the wake of the Three Gorges evacuations; an interview with the impresario of Datong City’s Workers’ Cultural Palace features him showing off his enormous salvaged portrait of Mao, complete with edges singed by fire. All these images suggest the enduring presence of the past with scars intact, ruins as historical records.
Zhao Tao as Qiaoqiao in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
Caught by the Tides also makes extensive use of music to orient protagonists and viewers alike in the flow of time. This has been a consistent thread through all of Jia’s output: his first feature, Xiao Wu (1997), is more or less structured around karaoke performances; Platform follows a group of young troupers from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, tracing this rapidly changing epoch through musical styles and fashion. In Caught by the Tides, music is foregrounded even more explicitly. As much a musicological as a romantic and historical odyssey, Jia’s latest is guided primarily by its soundtrack, largely avoiding dialogue for long stretches in favor of precisely chosen Shanxi opera, pop ballads, and rock songs. (In fact, Zhao does not utter a word during the film’s entire duration, her thoughts and speech rendered instead by a few very occasional intertitles.) The film begins with documentary shots of a group of women singing nostalgic duets in a slightly industrial-looking room in Shanxi and closes with Cui Jian’s COVID-era track “Ji Xu,” a rock anthem with an air of defiance detectable in its call for “standing up in the land of my birth.” Along the way are numerous interludes loaded with cultural and personal significance, as when Bin is introduced to the elderly Brother Xing, an unlikely TikTok star, lip-synching to a remix of George Lam’s ’80s hit “Genghis Khan,” a song that also features prominently in Platform.
Zhao Tao as Qiaoqiao and Li Zhubin as Guo Bin in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy CMPR.
The film evinces a nostalgia for not only China’s forgotten chapters but also Jia’s own career, along with the weight of history that it has had to bear. When Qiaoqiao and Bin reunite at the film’s end—the former working in a supermarket; the latter desperately looking for a fresh start—there is a bittersweet flash of recognition after they remove their PPE masks. She has softened only slightly with age; he walks with a limp, and his once-boyish countenance now sports some grizzled stubble. Time has inexorably moved on, pushing these characters forward and apart, affecting their faces and bodies unequally.
Leo Goldsmith is a writer, teacher, and curator based in Brooklyn.