To dig in to what works and what doesn’t in Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, you first have to figure out what it actually *is* – a question far harder to answer here than after most trips to the cinema. It’s part documentary, part drifting drama, and part clip show of Jia’s past films, all adding up to something that is both all three of these things and yet also none of them, working mostly as an elegiac, mournful poem about China in the 21st Century, made up of striking, ever-shifting imagery but very little momentum.
Repeating elements from Still Life, Ash is Purest White, and more of Jia’s back catalogue, Caught by the Tides again follows a woman named Qiao Qiao (again played by Jia’s regular lead actress and wife Tao Zhao) as she moves through China from the turn of the millennium up to the present day – in this case represented by the COVID era. Again, the Three Gorges Dam is an important location and, again again, Qiao Qiao has a crappy boyfriend called Guo Bin (Zhubin Li), who she spends much of the second act (made up of a huge amount of repurposed footage of earlier Jia films) searching for in a lonely city.
Actually figuring this plot out is one of the major challenges Caught by the Tides offers its viewers. The whole thing is opaque and often inscrutable, and the mix of re-used old scenes and general documentary footage in the first two acts (all captured by the grainy and easily blown-out digital cameras of the early Noughties) makes it hard to know when you’re actually watching a story taking place and when you’re just absorbing images. The imagery itself can be fascinating, even a bit funny and moving at times, but it’s nigh-on impossible to connect with the first two thirds of this film on an emotional level.
It coalesces more in the third and final act, jumping forward from 2006 to 2022 and the only segment of the film made entirely of newly-shot footage. Still, though, the image-making takes precedence over any sort of story involvement. The strange, isolated sterility of a China still observing relatively strict pandemic protocols and now-ubiquitous Western brands lighting up malls and city streets is all remarkable (a sequence in a grocery store shot with a 360 degree camera is particularly disarming), but the grand finale mostly just washes over you.
Jia’s fascination with China’s relationship with music also returns. Different genres and styles – some new, some traditional, some native, some imported – are all deployed expertly to highlight the fast-moving flux state that Chinese people and culture has been in throughout the 21st Century. It all adds up to Caught by the Tides being deeply compelling on a purely intellectual, even academic, level, but it’s so hard to properly connect with that it’d be hard to recommend if you’re not already a die-hard Jia fan.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 