Caught By the Tides: Jia Zhang-Ke’s New Film Mines Previous Footage to Inhabit the Past
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Since his 2013 film A Touch of Sin, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke has often revisited characters, actors, and motifs from his earlier work. But he has never pillaged the past so thoroughly as he does with his latest film, Caught By the Tides.
During the pandemic, Jia assembled montages, including outtakes, from his earlier films and, working with three editors — Yang Chao, Lin Xudong, and Matthieu Laclau — created a new feature film that is both a love story and a document of China’s epochal changes in recent decades.
The protagonist of Caught By the Tides is a Qiaoqiao, played by Jia’s wife and longtime collaborator, Zhao Tao in a performance that spans two decades. Here’s another strange thing: Throughout the film, her character doesn’t speak a word, though she sings and her thoughts are shown in onscreen titles.
Fortunately, Zhao has one of cinema’s most expressive faces, one that speaks not just volumes but entire libraries of emotional information. Her lively, mercurial presence is the glue that holds the mosaic of the film together.
We first see her as a young woman waiting at a bus stop, then as she walks past a group of coal miners emerging from their evening shift with their headlamps still lit. She enters a cabaret where she goes onstage as part of a performing dance troupe.
Later, we see her performing in various public scenes, as a dancer, singer, and model for clothes in a pop-up fashion show. Qiaoqiao is in love with Bin, a local hustler and her sometimes manager, played by Li Zhubin, who has acted with Zhao in three previous Jia films.
Their relationship is volatile and, after a fight on a bus, Bin texts Quioquio that he is leaving for another city to try to make some money, after which he’ll send for her. After a while, when he fails to respond to her texts, she decides to go find him.
Caught By the Tides has a three-part structure. The early segment relies on scenes from Unknown Pleasures (2002) and documentary footage, peppered with music, from folk to opera to pop and techno. The mood is chaotic, noisy, and full of optimism. Street loudspeakers declaring China has been admitted into the World Trade Organization, a street parade celebrates the news that it has won the rights to the 2008 Olympic Games.
In the anxious, darker middle section where Quioquio is searching for Bin, she travels to the county of Fengjie where buildings are being destroyed in preparation for flooding by the Three Gorges Dam. The segment includes scenes from Still Life (2006) and Ash Is the Purest White (2018). After placing a missing persons notice, she eventually tracks him down. In separate scenes, we see Bin has become entangled with a corrupt politician.
The final section, made up of original footage shot for the film, is set in 2022 during the pandemic. Quioquio is back in Danton, and a visibly aged Bin, walking with a cane, flies home to join her, but he’s out of touch in the new world. The city is under lockdown and the computer-programmed future has arrived.
When Quioquio goes to work as a cashier at Walmart, a cheerful-voiced robot greeter meets her. When Quioquio lifts her mask, the robot notes her unhappy expression and offers self-help quotes from Mother Teresa and Mark Twain. In the film’s kicker scene, Quioquio joins a group of runners on a night race through the city, confirming her ongoing resilience.
With its elliptical, patched-together structure and multi-year duration, Caught By the Tides can be a challenging film to follow but, by the end, it achieves something both original and rewarding. Countless films have indicated the past through flashbacks, period soundtracks, fashion, and digital de-aging.
None of those techniques can match a drama where the actors actually age and the world changes with them, including architecture, the landscape and even the methods of recording reality. Because the footage was shot over two decades in different formats, from videotape to digital video to 35mm film, the image changes remind us of the different frames of memory in which we hold on to the past.
Caught By the Tides. Directed by Jia Zhang-Ke. Screenplay by Jia Zhang-Ke and Wan Jiahuan. Starring Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin. In select theatres May 9 including Cinéma du Musée (Montreal), Vancity (Vancouver), and TIFF Lightbox (Toronto), with additional openings across Canada beginning May 16.