Editor’s Observe: This assessment was initially printed in the course of the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant. Sideshow and Janus Movies launch “Caught by the Tides” in choose theaters Friday, Might 9, 2025.
A looking out and scattershot portrait of displacement that’s as prone to resonate with Jia Zhang-ke devotees as it’s to mystify those that are new to his work, “Caught by the Tides” finds the Chinese language auteur returning probably the most pivotal characters and areas which have outlined his motion pictures during the last 20 years. Then once more, maybe it could be extra correct to say that he by no means left them.
Tracing the faintest contours of a scripted love story across the scaffolding of some documentary footage that Jia has collected over the course of twenty-two years, this elusive chimera of a movie strains to literalize the fragile relationship between time and reminiscence — a theme that has turn out to be more and more central to the director’s work for the reason that Three Gorges Dam was constructed in 2006 (see: “Nonetheless Life”), submerging 13 total cities and without end displacing the hundreds of thousands of people that as soon as lived in them. Right here, much more so than in his sweeping epics “Mountains Might Depart” and “Ash Is Purest White,” Jia’s focus is squarely on resilience as an alternative of abrasion. How can we keep a coherent sense of self, not to mention love any individual else, in a world so risky and impermanent that folks will sink centuries of historical past to the underside of the ocean simply to make approach for tomorrow?
“Caught by the Tides” naturally struggles for a solution, however the movie’s drifting energy has extra to do with how Jia frames the query. The story he tells right here strikes alongside the tectonic plates of technological development, and so it stands to purpose that its photographs are outlined by the instruments used to seize them. Arresting because it to observe Zhao Tao, Jia’s spouse and muse, reprise a task that she originated all the way in which again in 2002’s “Unknown Pleasures,” each shot of her silent however indomitable Qiaoqiao is first processed via the facet ratio and digital readability of the display round her.
We first meet Qiaoqiao within the northern coal mining metropolis of Datong on the flip of the millennium, the place she works as a contract mannequin who’s managed by her boyfriend Brother Bin (“A Contact of Sin” actor Li Zhubin). Most of the time, Jia exhibits her going about her enterprise — dancing exterior a retail retailer, keeping off handsy avenue punks, and so on. — in crisp HD video shot on an Arri Alexa. Nonetheless, these scenes are intercut with low-def DV video that Jia recorded on the time this story is about. A gaggle of ladies sing to commemorate a vacation in boxy 4:3. The supervisor of a dilapidated constructing known as the Staff’ Cultural Palace provides a speech about his plans for the house.
At one level, Jia cuts from one format to a different, as Qiaoqiao barnstorms right into a nightclub with out stopping because the picture switches from lush widescreen to grainy DV. My preliminary assumption was that Jia had dressed Zhao to match a snippet of previous footage he had taken in Datong, successfully making a seamless ellison in time. And although a back-and-forth with Jia by way of the movie’s gross sales crew has muddied my understanding of precisely what he’s doing right here, the destabilization of reminiscence is achieved all the identical, as “Caught by the Tides” palpably overlaps the previous with the current in a approach that frustrates our potential to parse out the place one ends and the opposite begins. What can we maintain onto because the world is remade earlier than our eyes?
For Qiaoqiao and Brother Bin, the reply is one another. Type of. Jia’s deeply textured romantic streak urges this film ahead a lot because it has a lot of his latest work, however “Caught by the Tides” is way too elliptical to comply with the rhythms of a standard love story. Qiaoqiao’s unwillingness to talk — she solely expresses phrases by way of textual content message, despite the fact that she has the power to speak — lends itself to a vaguely outlined relationship that’s solely sketched within the broadest of strokes, and at all times with a deal with distance.
Regardless of missing Qiaoqiao’s ambition, Brother Bin ultimately decides to go away Datong for an even bigger metropolis (and a few reasonably forgettable gangster enterprise). Qiaoqiao finally spends the subsequent 20 years touring throughout China in pursuit of her misplaced love, a chase that you simply shouldn’t be shocked to be taught will convey her to the Three Gorges Dam alongside the Yangtze River. Know-how advances at an exponential fee (Jia’s conceit with the cameras is strengthened by his deal with the couple’s evolving relationships to cell telephones and robotics), and the movie’s characters age in flip. Zhao can apparently look wherever between 20 and 50 relying on the context of a given scene, whereas Li… can’t, to a level that tends to deepen the movie’s atemporal confusion. A minimum of the scene the place Brother Bin insists he’s 32 provides some humor to a film that would use a bit extra levity.
The dialogue, similar to it’s, depends extra upon wistful dislocation. The written exchanges between Qiaoqiao and Brother Bin jogged my memory of Makoto Shinkai’s anime quick “Voices of a Distant Star,” by which two teenagers on reverse sides of the galaxy attempt to keep a textual content relationship within the face of extreme time dilation. “So shut, but up to now” reads one of many title playing cards right here. Others quote lyrics from among the songs that wallpaper the film’s soundtrack, as Jia braids collectively an eccentric playlist of period-appropriate tunes that caught my consideration for his or her sonic variety, however will doubtless resonate with Chinese language audiences for a way they crystallize explicit moments in time. One blares out as individuals rejoice their nation touchdown the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Later, the tip credit are accompanied by Cui Jian’s “Ji Xu,” a motivational anthem from the early days of the pandemic. The climactic scenes main as much as that needle drop are naturally interspersed with video that Jia shot on his iPhone.
These signifiers — and lots of others — slush across the movie’s characters as they transfer backwards and forwards with the waves, their toes determined for some sort of strong floor to face on. Every little thing modifications besides for his or her imprecise emotions for one another, to the purpose that it begins to appear as if their waterlogged affection is the one a part of their identities that point isn’t capable of dilute utterly. “Caught by the Tides” is by nature an imprecise movie, tethered to the buoys that Jia has collected through the years and vulnerable to drifting via time with none clear sense of the place it’d take it.
Its emotional influence is muted and its romance virtually purely conceptual, however the truth that Qiaoqiao and Brother Bin’s affection — or much more consciousness — survive all of this tumult and transformation is transferring unto itself, as is Jia’s dedication to documenting that change. He distills greater than 20 years of imperceptible flux into 111 minutes of fleeting human drama, the tender closing moments of which discover their energy by discovering the wonder within the embers of reminiscence that point hasn’t been capable of snuff out.
Grade: B-
“Caught by the Tides” premiered in Competitors on the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant. Sideshow and Janus Movies launch it Friday, Might 9, 2025.