***½/****
starring Zhao Tao, Li Zhubing
written and directed by Jia Zhangke
by Angelo Muredda While some spent their COVID lockdowns making sourdough starters and boning up on the medicinal properties of horse dewormer, Jia Zhangke retraced two decades’ worth of cinematic memories, from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures to 2018’s Ash is Purest White, weaving them into a singular new project about urban alienation and the passage of time. Caught by the Tides is the formally playful product of that act of pandemic creative stir-craziness. Conceived and partially shot in the final days of China’s COVID-Zero policies in 2022, the film takes the real-life constraints of social distancing and contact tracing as an aesthetic inspiration to burrow into the past before standing firmly on the present. The strange times, and their restrictions on film shoots, prompt Jia to revisit and reposition the actors, characters, and settings of his oeuvre into a contemporary mosaic. Inspired, as he said at the film’s NYFF festival premiere, by ukiyo-e art from the Edo Period, a tradition of Japanese woodblock prints of transient urban life and folk scenes, he’s fashioned a singular floating world portrait of 21st-century China.
In its first third, the film plays out as an alternate version of Unknown Pleasures, where Jia’s longtime collaborator (and wife) Zhao Tao played the aimless twentysomething singer and dancer Qiao Qiao, a proto-influencer performing at local festivals for liquor brands in depressed northern coal-mining town Datong while navigating a toxic relationship with her older, small-time crook boyfriend and manager (Li Zhubing). While Li’s bad boyfriend dies in a freak auto accident in Unknown Pleasures, here his character, rechristened Bin, abruptly leaves Datong in search of work in a more industrialized area to the south, telling Qiao Qiao by text that he will send for her when he gets there. The second part takes place a few years later, with a jilted Qiao Qiao looking for Bin in Guangdong Province amidst the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, whose mass dislocation of civilians is etched into the landscape in the abandoned and demolished homes and rising water all around her. Having never heard from Bin again, Qiao Qiao pursues him by sailing down the Yangtze River in footage repurposed from outtakes and local-colour B-roll shot during the making of 2006’s Still Life, in which Zhao starred as a different character also estranged from a former partner named Bin. The ex-lovers fleetingly reconnect here, only to part on bad terms and meet again in COVID-era Datong in the film’s final segment, which takes place in the present moment with bemused eyes, even pausing to observe a new type of TikTok influencer making sponsored content online instead of in person.
Rather like Kirsten Johnson’s documentary autobiography Cameraperson, a portrait of the artist as a pack-rat, ruminating over images and stories she’s collected from her life as a cinematographer, Caught by the Tides makes a surprisingly accessible entry point to Jia’s filmography, even as it anticipates some prior knowledge of his body of work. It still helps to have that familiarity, if only to appreciate the alternative angles, scenes, and image formats on display as Jia revisits his digital and film photography from those earlier shoots, some of which is re-coloured and massaged to fit within the new work and some of which is allowed to stand in stark contrast to its fresh context–serving as singular patches in an audiovisual quilt. Having the older films as touchstones against which to measure the new one also fleshes out the concept behind his blending of different characters played by the same actors across this more than twenty-year span, suggesting Jia sees narrative films as documentary records of the actors within them, aging as they stand in spaces that themselves inevitably change over time.
As confusing as this cross-stitching of characters and actors across decades and projects might sound, Caught by the Tides is an amiably free-floating experience. It’s best appreciated not as a literal sequel to or remake of the earlier films, but as a kind of impressionistic, contemporary remaster you could see Jia revising again in another two decades, this time with COVID-era B-roll from Caught by the Tides. Freed from the more high-maintenance demands of film in his first digitally-shot feature Unknown Pleasures, Jia captured fleeting, improvisational moments of nightlife in karaoke bars and on street corners, even catching a thunderstorm during one character’s failed motorbike escape from Datong. Jia’s balance between his masterful compositional sense and his magpie-like appreciation for the accidental, transitory sights and sounds of urban life, the kind of things you can only catch with a lightweight camera, is even more pronounced in Caught by the Tides, which is constantly burnishing little bits of ephemera. That includes real local women’s spirited performances of folk songs and Qiao Qiao’s peppy dance to the period-appropriate Swedish earworm “Butterfly” in the first part and striking images of an abandoned COSMOPOLITAN BRIDE magazine and a Barbie doll frozen in high-kick pose left in the rubble of a demoed building in a town upstream of the dam in the second part. Jia’s instinct for how minute, incidental details reveal the broader strokes of the times is just as sharp in the rueful 2022 section, where he makes an archive of the pandemic-era’s bric-a-brac in urban China. People delicately doff their respirators to massage their sore mask lines on planes and trains, anxiously spray down the passenger seat in front of them, and even take in a masks-required ballroom-dance class with an attendant misting the floors in sanitizer spray as they whirl around.
Through these changing tides both archival and contemporary, Zhao serves as Jia’s anchor. Jia’s key collaborator for more than 20 years, Zhao has brought an emotional dexterity and versatility to everything from the youth-malaise millennial drama of Unknown Pleasures to the sprawling crime tragedy of Ash is Purest White, often playing characters whose fortunes profoundly change over time. Here, the life changes are written on Zhao’s own increasingly lined face, her earlier fiction performances taking on a second meaning as nonfiction records of her body onscreen over the course of her career as well as Jia’s. She gives a remarkably expressive performance in Caught by the Tides, all the more impressive for being dialogue-free (the better to sync up the new material with the archival elements) and, in the final portion, largely delivered beneath a KN95 mask, telling the story of a quarter-century worth of progress, stasis, and disappointment almost entirely with her eyes.
