Doesn’t add any real value to Jia’s impressive body of work, this tonally jarring montage of new material and unused scenes from past projects sees Zhao Tao playing a silent woman navigating a quarter century of longing, regrets and opportunities in a modernising China.
Review #2,975
Dir. Jia Zhangke
2024 | China | Drama | 111min | 1.85:1 | Mandarin
NC16 (passed clean) for some mature content
Cast: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin, Pan Jianlin, Zhou Lan, Zhou You
Plot: Years after her boyfriend left her for the big city and promised to bring her there after he’s settled down, a Chinese woman sets out on a journey to be reunited with him.
Awards: Nom. for Palme d’Or (Cannes)
International Sales: MK2
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – 21st Century China; Modernisation; Memory
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex/Vignettes
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
I’m not sure how best to describe Caught by the Tides. It’s like a greatest hits album of an artist whose greatest hits aren’t necessarily featured, let alone in a meaningful way, but comprises unused materials of existing tracks that are excerpted, remixed and refashioned with new material.
The result, according to some critics, is a masterful weaving of past and present as Jia Zhangke, the foremost screen chronicler of China’s socioeconomic and cultural development over the last quarter century, gives us what might be his most ambitious film yet.
Unfortunately, I have a different take. No matter how hard I tried, even as a fan I couldn’t resonate with Caught by the Tides.
Despite Jia’s superb use of music and songs in his body of work, here it doesn’t work out and thus the entire film feels tonally jarring and it doesn’t get better.
Zhao Tao, a familiar figure in Jia’s filmography, is seen in different time periods, from the early days of Still Life (one of my favourite films of the 2000s decade) to present-day China.
“The new century’s first springtime is approaching us.”
Much of the time, she’s either dancing, singing or wandering through the streets of increasingly cosmopolitan Chinese cities… once again searching for someone. She’s silent but her face reveals a stoic expression against the tides of change.
As we enter the 2020s marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the inevitable penetration of AI into our daily lives, we also see Jia making his ‘digital aesthetics’ and ‘editing flourishes’ more apparent, as if trying to adapt to a new world of content-making, a far cry from the early ‘pixelated’ days of the digital video camera.
While films like Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), which adopts a similar approach (i.e. unused footage from different projects shot over decades) and is much more disparate and fragmented than Jia’s work, feels paradoxically more encompassing of an artist’s career and modus operandi, I don’t quite feel the same way for Caught by the Tides.
It isn’t a pointless film for sure, but I don’t see it adding any real value to his cinema.
Grade: C
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 