Caught by the Tides

Longitudinal filmmaking – the process of making a film over years, maybe even decades, to accurately reflect the passage of time – is a risky pursuit. Austin’s own Richard Linklater is arguably its greatest living practitioner. His most prominent example is the Oscar-winning Boyhood, shot over 11 years, although his ongoing adaptation of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along seems set to eclipse that at 20 years. However, those are deliberate efforts, as opposed to Caught by the Tides, the latest from Chinese experimentalist Jia Zhang-ke. Rather than the execution of a plan, it’s about creating structure where none was ever intended.

If anything, it’s a testament to the possibilities raised by building a reliable ensemble. In this case, it’s the troupe built around his regular lead (and real-life wife) Zhao Tao and actor Li Zhubin, who has appeared in three of the director’s prior works – two of which, 2002’s Unknown Pleasures and his 2006 international breakout, Still Life, are partially cannibalized to provide footage for Caught by the Tides. Along with footage from Jia’s last feature, 2019’s Ash Is Purest White, as well as outtakes, B-roll, random footage that the director has captured over the last quarter century, and a capper shot during the pandemic, Jia employs a cut-up technique to create a semi-abstract collage.

Superficially, it’s a story of romance deferred, as singer/dancer and gig economy survivor Qiao Qiao (Tao) and her ambitious once-and-maybe-future lover, Guo Bin (Li), bounce in and out of each other’s lives across two decades. However, Jia seemingly isn’t as interested in the through line the central performances provide as he is in a broader portrait of his China. That’s a wise idea, not least because trying to assemble coherent performances or a linear script from these scraps would be foolhardy. Instead, he uses the two divided lovers as exemplars of life in postmillennial China.

For fans of Jia, it’s also a way to appreciate how he has evolved as a director, how his later work has regained the almost anti-style of his earliest films. Yet his low-key directorial approach doesn’t automatically mean that the footage coheres. If anything, the “real” scenes often stand out as formalist, an occasional reminder that drama is inherently artifice. Instead, it’s in the semi-improvised or captured moments, like the looks of desperation and abandonment on the faces of old men on the streets of a mining community, that Caught by the Tides is most striking.

Jia’s decision to reopen his own archives presents him with two remarkable opportunities. First, to create a truly unique career retrospective for Tao that keeps her work vital and alive rather than serving as a capstone. But arguably more important is his reappraisal of the history he has captured, placing it within a greater context and with the bitter wisdom of age. When he set Still Life against the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, his focus was more on the plight of the workers demolishing communities. Here, the destruction and eventual flooding of Fengjie village is about watching an entire community’s history be destroyed.

Yet this allows him to provide a rebuttal to the idea that he can be sentimental about the past. Jia’s work is often a critique of China’s rush to modernity, but at no point does Caught by the Tides suggest that it’s being built on the ruins of a pastoral idyll. The past wasn’t that great, he implies, but if you’re going to replace it then make it something better – and that applies to Qiao Qiao and Guo Bin.