Caught by the Tides
When Bin (Li Zhubin) leaves their hometown city of Datong, Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao, "Unknown Pleasures," "Ash is Purest White") travels all the way to Fengjie, a city soon to disappear because of the Three Gorges Dam project, to find him. Over decades, their lives are "Caught by the Tides."
Laura's Review: B
Cowriter (with Jiahuan Wan)/director Jia Zhangke has been chronicling the changing landscape and culture of China throughout his career. With his latest, he augments a new narrative with footage he's shot over the past twenty-three years, some of it documentary snippets from annual trips to Datong, much of that focused on his love of music. Most significantly, he revisits footage, used and unused, mostly from his 2006 feature "Still Life," which also featured Zhao Tao playing a character searching for her husband in Fengjie before it is flooded by the Three Gorges Dam project.
Zhangke begins his film with a group of female friends and family each taking their turn at a song before turning his attention to Datong's Workers' Cultural Palace, a building which has clearly seen better days. A new owner is reviving it as a gathering place, mostly for retired mine workers to go listen to women sing Shanxi opera (as he speaks to the camera, he stands next to a giant portrait of Chairman Mao, which he says he rescued from a wood pile out back and plans to rehang). We will see Qiaoqiao wander through the streets, harassed by the wolf calls of young men on mopeds, then at home swatting a fly, and downtown modeling at an outdoor fashion show. We'll also see her distraught on an unmoving bus alone with Bin, who keeps her from leaving time and time again until he doesn't.
Because Zhangke is creating a new story with unused footage combined with new, his narrative can be muddled, especially from this point until Qiaoqiao files a missing person report on Bin in Fengjie. We do not hear Qiaoqiao speak, Zhangke instead using title cards for dialogue added to old footage. Bin, too, is not heard speaking to Qiaoqiao, although he does speak to Brother Pan (Pan Jianlin), the man he appears to be in corrupt cahoots with deconstructing Fengjie. But "Caught in the Tides" works despite this, showing us two people buffeted by Chinese history over the course of time. We not only feel time slipping by, but can see it, Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin both having aged just like their characters when the film arrives at the COVID pandemic almost twenty years after the couple's last meeting in 2006.
These later years find Bin flying on a plane of masked travellers to Zhuhai to see if Pan can offer him employment, only to find the man in the hospital, Pan's younger partner Zhou (Zhou You) informing him they now work promoting Tik Tok stars. Back in Datong, we see Qiaoqiao, who years earlier watched an American sci-fi film about robots in a Fengjie tea room, interacting with a robot at the supermarket where she now works, less glamorous work than her earlier years. She watches couples dancing, one woman dancing alone, as if with a partner. When Bin returns home on a high speed train (a contrast to the old bus and ferries seen as earlier transport), he goes to that supermarket and, recognizing his cashier, pulls his mask down. The two wonder off into the evening, watching a band perform a song about lovers parting and reuniting over the years. Zhangke concludes with a strong and surprising finale, Qiaoqiao making a silent statement.
Zhangke achieves a meditative, lyrical quality as we hear Chinese rock and pop as he pans along Datong street scenes, frames Qiaoqiao on a ferry on the Yangtze or follows her wandering the devastated streets of Fengjie. The city of Datong changes along with the film's stars, the ancient city and coal mining capital having been remade into a tourist hub. "Caught by the Tides" is a melancholy contemplation of lives lived.
Robin's Review: B
Qiao Qiao (Tao Zhao) and Bin (Zhubin Li) live a happy life in a northern China city. He leaves her to find new opportunities near the Three Gorges Dam project far away and promises to send for her when he earns enough money. He never does and she journeys far to find him in “Caught by the Tides.”
This “story,” if you can call it that, is actually a compilation of bits and pieces of director Jia Zhang-ke’s films from the last 20+ years. At the center of the film’s plot is Qiao Qiao, the silent woman who never utters a word, searching for her true love. Except, for her, it is a case of be careful what you search for, it might not be what you think you want.
This loosely structured “search” is punctuated with the ongoing progress of the Three Gorges project. Over the course of the 20 years of film, we see it develop and devour the cities that it submerged. It is an odd look at a specific place in the current Chinese culture as the director’s cameras show montages and visual tapestries of the lives of the people in northern China. It is a look of life very different from my own, making for an immersion in another world.
Tao Zhao, as the silent, searching woman, is a constant presence throughout the film and we watch the two main actors age over the years. The time lapsed seems to have graced Zhao more than her co-star Zhubin Li. I am impressed by the amount of emotion Zhao displays, without words, making her quiet performance fascinating to watch, though not for everyone.
Over the course of the two plus decades of filming, things progress at a normal pace, until 2020 and COVID-19. Then, we see the world in China change dramatically. The whole work is a tapestry of Chinese culture spanning decades and Jia Zhang-ke compacts it all into a tight 111 minutes with song and dance prominent.
Janus Sideshow released "Caught by the Tides" in select theaters on 5/9/25, expanding in subsequent weeks. Click here for playdate and theater information.
