Caught by the Tides – first-look review

Caught by the Tides is a won­drous mas­ter­piece from Chi­nese film­mak­er Jia Zhangke, a sprawl­ing work of exper­i­men­tal audio-visu­al fusion that stands as the heady cul­mi­na­tion of what is already one of the most sto­ried and acclaimed careers in 21^st cen­tu­ry cinema.

Yet the exper­i­men­tal basis of its mon­tage – the result of the direc­tor attempt­ing to find a place for snatch­es of footage from a per­son­al archive that he’s been amass­ing over the years – some­how cul­mi­nates in a heart­break­ing roman­tic melo­dra­ma of the type that was being made by Japan­ese film­mak­ers such as Mikio Naruse and Ken­ji Mizoguchi. Oh, and one more thing: Jia’s recent yen for refor­mu­lat­ing clas­si­cal genre sees Caught by the Tides also framed as an eclec­tic juke­box musi­cal that mix­es bub­blegum elec­tro-pop dit­ties, lan­guorous folk­songs and all the hits of the Shang­hai Opera rotation.

This is a film that fol­lows a rela­tion­ship across a cou­ple of decades, and much like Naruse’s clas­sic, Float­ing Clouds, it’s about a man and a woman who are in love with one anoth­er, but nev­er at the same time. We’re in Datong City, a one-time min­ing hub that has fall­en on tough times. Wan­der­ing mod­el and dancer Quio­quio (Zhao Tao) is a pret­ty ghost who allows her face and her eyes to talk for her, even though she doesn’t have much to say. She’s in some kind of rela­tion­ship with small­time mover and shak­er Broth­er Bin (Li Zhuh­bin), but it appears as if she is per­haps one of many female companions.

His deci­sion to leave town and for more eco­nom­i­cal­ly ver­dant climes takes him to Fengjie, the site of mass cul­tur­al dev­as­ta­tion and dis­place­ment due to the government’s Three Gorges Dam project. He tells Quio­quio to wait for him and he’ll call her, but he nev­er does. And so she decides to fol­low, and recon­nect with her lover. Scenes of Zhao wan­der­ing amid the urban dev­as­ta­tion, but only inter­est­ed in locat­ing Broth­er Bing, as both hor­ri­bly trag­ic and deeply roman­tic. The sit­u­a­tions that Quio­quio finds her­self in, and the lengths she goes to re-ignite this flame are tes­ta­ment to her love. Yet Jia nev­er makes this tip over into psy­chosis or obses­sion – it’s a sug­ges­tion that, in a place where peo­ple have so lit­tle, what else would there be to search for?

This Anto­nioni-esque jour­ney of lilt­ing exis­ten­tial reflec­tion mus­es on how we deal with emo­tion­al absence, how we inter­act with (or ignore) the imme­di­ate land­scape, and it even pon­ders whether the endgame of ram­pant com­mer­cial­ism is not one that involves human beings. There’s a beau­ti­ful sequence in which Quio­quio inter­acts with a ser­vice robot at a shop­ping mall, in which she teas­es it into read­ing the emo­tions on her face. Jia also appears to be a fan of Tik­Tok in its capac­i­ty to sud­den­ly enrich the most unex­pect­ed of sub­jects. He is cer­tain­ly mea­sured when it comes to gaug­ing the impact of the techno-apolcalypse.

Caught by the Tides is a rich and dense­ly lay­ered text whose many intel­lec­tu­al pos­tu­la­tions are buoyed by a cen­tral sto­ry­line that is so naked­ly roman­tic that it cre­ates a per­fect bal­ance of brain and heart food. The first chap­ter will take a lit­tle per­se­ver­ance, but it’s finale con­tains one of the most per­fect scenes the direc­tor has ever shot, cap­ping off what sure­ly must be one of his most exhil­a­rat­ing and pro­found works to date. And it must be not­ed that this is the con­fir­ma­tion (were it need­ed) that Zhao Tao is one of, if not the, great­est liv­ing screen actor.