Director: Jia Zhangke
Writers: Jia Zhangke and Jiahuan Wan
Stars: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin
Synopsis: In early 2000s China, Qiao Qiao and Guao Bin share a passionate but fragile love. When Guao Bin disappears to try his luck in another province, Qiao Qiao decides to go looking for him.
Of the two films at this year’s New York Film Festival to follow a jilted lover as she travels from city to city in order to find the devious man who abandoned her without warning, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides is the one that manages to weave a narrative that remains as mesmerizing as it is unconventionally-masterful. The other picture in question, Miguel Gomes’ Cannes-award winning Grand Tour, is certainly a brilliant, compelling work in its own right, a genre-bending tale that fuses its 1917-set plot and modern documentary footage together, something Caught by the Tides does in a similar fashion. But there’s something to be said for the significance of Zhangke’s latest, a poetic triumph in illusory construction that, with less, achieves more than other films of a similar ilk, if those titles even exist.
The conceit, insofar as there is one beyond the general idea of a woman searching for her missing mate, is much more about the magnitude of Zhangke’s career, as well as how his long-time muse and partner, Zhao Tao, has been a stalwart in his filmography. His latest is hardly the first time Tao has been the focal point in one of the director’s narratives. Yet what makes it the most fascinating role she’s ever taken on is that it is quite literally 20-plus years in the making. Consisting almost entirely of footage from the archive Zhangke has been curating throughout the various stages of his storied career, Caught by the Tides takes the Chinese master’s cutting-room floor material – most of which includes a wordless Tao, who began working with Zhangke in his 2000 film, Platform – and puts it to imaginative, remarkable use.
As per usual with Zhangke’s films, Tides’ structure allows it to say more about China’s ever-transforming socioeconomic climate than any of his other films, a surprise considering how heavily that narrative element is deployed in practically everything he’s made. Whether it’s a story about the tender barrier that exists between youthful ignorance and eventual maturation – Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and Mountains May Depart – or a chronicle how lives can inexplicably become marred by random acts of violence and the persistence of the country’s implicit underworld politics – A Touch of Sin and Ash is Purest White – Zhangke has never been one to shy away from getting his most important message across: That he doesn’t recognize his home anymore, and that such a sensation only becomes more apparent in the years since he began his filmmaking career.
Caught by the Tides is no exception to that rule, instead serving as an assertion that it is as pertinent now as it was in the early 2000s. When the film’s electric soundtrack falls away to make room for natural sound or some occasional dialogue, we often hear radio and television newscasts reporting that the nation’s water level continues to rise around the Three Gorges Dam (a structure that not only decimated 13 cities and displaced the inhabitants in the process, but played a prominent role in Zhangke’s 2006 drama, Still Life). It would make for a far more poignant cog in Caught by the Tides’ machine if not for our cognizance of how similar its beats are to those of Still Life, not to mention the fact that Tao is periodically seen wearing the same outfit in this film that she wore throughout the former. For those who are new to Zhangke’s work, these sections may play out more naturally, even if they are too slight to digest properly. As for how such choices will go over completists, wagers should be set on one of two responses: Frustration at obvious repetition, or nostalgic admiration for the connection the director still has to his earliest work all these years later, even if partial attribution should go to his love for Tao.
That this film moves with Tao like the tide does the moon should be no surprise, then, considering the intimacy that Zhangke and Tao have developed over the course of their entwined careers and life together. Regardless of its familiar elements, those of which occasionally felt like Zhangke wasn’t sure where else to turn other than back in the direction from which he came, Caught by the Tides is all the more captivating a project considering how, while carving out its own narrative, it consciously (and fondly) looks back upon a master at work, something plenty of films tend to do with a heavier hand than they should ever deploy. Films like Neo Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, a documentary consisting of one last performance from the legendary Japanese composer, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Exposé du film annonce du film “Scenario,” a snapshot of Godard’s storyboarding process that played as part of the Spotlight section at this year’s New York Film Festival, are gentle exceptions. But in Caught by the Tides’ case, it feels fitting for Zhangke to remain behind the camera, charting his directorial escapades through something both familiar and wholly original. As Tao once said of working with Zhangke on Mountains May Depart, the evolution of their partnership has afforded her more freedom to fill in “blanks” where necessary. What better way to celebrate the magic of cinema, not to mention a love born from it, than to take what couldn’t fill those old blanks and make something beautiful and new from their contents?
Caught by the Tides will be released in theaters by Sideshow and Janus Films on an unspecified date “in the coming months,” per Variety.