Caught by the Tides review – moving, stirring,… | Little White Lies

Caught by the Tides review – mov­ing, stir­ring, brilliant

11 Apr 2025 / Released: 11 Apr 2025

Words by Esther Rosenfield

Directed by Jia Zhang-ke

Starring Li Zhubin, Tao Zhao, and You Zhou

Cluttered interior of a van, with a woman sitting on a couch and a man standing. Varied colours and shapes, with items scattered throughout the space.
Cluttered interior of a van, with a woman sitting on a couch and a man standing. Varied colours and shapes, with items scattered throughout the space.
4

Anticipation.

Jia’s first narrative feature in six years.

5

Enjoyment.

Immerse yourself in the rolling tides of history (and Zhao Tao’s face).

5

In Retrospect.

Moving, stirring, brilliant work from one of cinema’s great director/star partnerships.

Jia Zhangke’s first fea­ture in six years is a sweep­ing epic anchored by the cap­ti­vat­ing Zhao Tao, his muse and most fre­quent collaborator.

There have been a sur­feit of films in recent years by old­er auteurs look­ing back, in one way or anoth­er, at their lega­cies. From Mar­tin Scorsese’s The Irish­man to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabel­mans, the trend of the decade is for film­mak­ers of an advanced age to reck­on with their fil­mo­gra­phies. Jia Zhangke is only 54, but he breaks the mould with Caught by the Tides, a rad­i­cal recon­struc­tion of some of his ear­li­est work.

It fol­lows lovers Qiao (Jia muse Zhao Tao) and Bin (Li Zhu­bin) across two decades as they drift in and out of each other’s lives, even­tu­al­ly recon­nect­ing dur­ing Covid. The film’s first two acts con­sist of footage shot dur­ing the pro­duc­tions of Jia’s 2002 film Unknown Plea­sures and his 2006 film Still Life, which starred both Zhao and Li as dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. Jia recon­tex­tu­alis­es these scenes as part of one con­tin­u­ous nar­ra­tive, which con­cludes with new mate­r­i­al shot in 2022. Many of these scenes were delet­ed from his ear­li­er films, but some of them are sim­ply reused from the ear­li­er works, giv­en new mean­ing through, among oth­er things, silent film-style inter­ti­tles and on-screen text messages.

It’s a fit­ting devel­op­ment for Jia, who fre­quent­ly remix­es ideas and char­ac­ters from pre­vi­ous works. His last nar­ra­tive fea­ture, Ash is Purest White, also fea­tured Zhao as a woman named Qiao who meets a crim­i­nal named Bin and has a decades-span­ning roman­tic rela­tion­ship with him, although Bin was played by anoth­er actor there. In Caught by the Tides, a Still Life-era scene has Qiao bran­dish a taser in much the same way she wields a gun in Ash is Purest White. In 2006, Qiao watch­es a CGI film about a robot who can­not feel sad­ness. In 2022, she meets a real robot in a gro­cery store with an uncan­ny grasp of human emotions.

The effect of see­ing Zhao and Li age 20 years in the span of two hours is strik­ing, even more so because of the cam­eras on which Jia shot those old­er films. The Unknown Plea­sures-era scenes are grainy and jud­dery video, while the Still Life footage has a sharp­er HD look. With the 4K scenes at the end, Caught by the Tides becomes a full-spec­trum his­to­ry of dig­i­tal film­mak­ing. More com­pelling, though, is how Jia uses the smoothen­ing of the imagery as a metaphor for aging. Qiao and Bin are young when the film begins, in their twen­ties with ener­gy and pas­sion to spare. The first act is full of club­bing, par­ty­ing, and hot tem­pers, a por­trait of shift­less youth much more abstract than the film from which it takes its footage. By the end, Qiao and Bin are old and slow, dig­ni­fied but uncool. Both they and the 4K images have more clar­i­ty, but less edge.

The film is glued togeth­er by Zhao, one of cinema’s most enthralling actors, accom­plish­ing the her­culean task of cre­at­ing a coher­ent char­ac­ter out of mul­ti­ple dis­parate and decades-old per­for­mances. She’s able to con­vey emo­tions with the sub­tlest facial move­ments, even (and most impres­sive­ly) when cov­ered by a mask in the Covid-era scenes. More than a ret­ro­spec­tive of his own work, Caught by the Tides is a lov­ing trib­ute by Jia to his most mean­ing­ful collaborator.

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