TIFF '24: A second opinion on "Caught by the Tides"

by Cláudio Alves

Zhao Tao in Jia Zhangke's CAUGHT BY THE TIDES (2024).

Every year, as the fall festival season hits, films heretofore seen by an exclusive set at their original premieres are given the opportunity for re-appreciation and new sets of critical eyes. It's always fascinating to see how a Cannes reaction may be upended at TIFF, for better or worse. Here at The Film Experience, that phenomenon is bolstered by a heterogeneous team whose opinions often differ. Consider the case of Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides, which played in the main competition at Cannes. To our own Elisa Giudici, it was a disappointment and an indisputably minor entry in the Chinese director's canon. For me, however, it's closer to masterpiece status, a cumulative wonder that's as major as you can get…

Many auteurs spend their whole careers circling the same stories, providing subtle variation across time. While Jia Zhangke isn't at the level of Ozu's obsessive circling back to his pictures' past premises, there's an undeniable continuity to much of his work. That is especially true in regard to Zhao Tao's presence across his filmography. The director's wife, his muse and most crucial collaborator, often plays women who could be living different stages of the same shared life. At times, Jia has even brought back costumes and props, setting and character names, providing a refrain and expansion of a figure's particular fate. As a narrative exercise, Ash Is Purest White is the most definitive example, tying itself back to Unknown Pleasures and Still Life.

Or, at least, Ash Is Purest White read like the definitive example back when it premiered in 2019. Five years later, it plays less like culmination than a dress rehearsal for what Jia delivers in Caught by the Tides. Instead of recreating the lives once depicted in his works, the director goes straight to the source and remixes old footage to create an epic that's as much one woman's odyssey as a mural of 21st-century China. Jia's characters have always felt entangled with their nation's fate and constant change, afloat in the currents of recent history, drifting, drowning. Zhao Tao's latest heroine, Qiao Qiao, has an almost Sisyphean quality about her, traveling the same roads she once did in a perpetual cinematic cycle.

But crucially, Caught by the Tides is also a love story. And as much as Qiao Qiao is condemned to roll her rock up the hill of recent Chinese history, there and back again, she's also a romantic heroine in pursuit of the one that got away. The footage that opens the film is no random gesture, after all. Replaying and remixing documentary images from 2001, Jia both places the beginning of his epic in the geographic and cultural specificities of Datong and sets the mood for love. Huddled around a stove, local women sing love songs, sharing them in a circle of old tunes full of yearning and broken hearts, the perseverance to wait, to pursue, to despair with a smile.

For that is to be Qiao Qiao's fate for the film's first two acts. Jia breathes new life into footage from Unknown Pleasures and other projects, tracing the death rattle of the relationship between her and Bin, played again by Li Zhubin. We're made to revisit that film's best scene, a quarrel of repetitive motion that ends with a discarding of artifice, the break of all pretense between lovers, the camera and its subject. At the end of it, Bin leaves to try his luck elsewhere. Years later, up the Yangtze River, Caught by the Tides follows Qiao Qiao to the territory to be submerged by the Three Gorge Dam. She's looking for Bin, but he proves slippery. Finding him is like trying to catch smoke with one's hands, grasping at nothing.

Here, Jia recycles material from the Still Life shoot, significantly expanding what that film showed of Zhao Tao's character. But because the text for Caught by the Tides is different enough from its predecessors, there comes a point when dialogue would break the spell. So, Jia employs silent film technique, going so far as using intertitles to stage a conversation between the two paramours reunited and soon to be separated again. It's a mesmerizing thing to witness, reshaping images from the Golden Lion winner, changing rhythms and cuts to originate new meanings. In some significant ways, it's an exercise in pure cinematic form. 

It's also a meditation on Jia's trajectory as a filmmaker. Caught by the Tides gets stuck in its Still Life chapter for a long time, as if the story were entrapped by the monumental construction bound to displace millions. Considering the director's history, one can define the Three Gorge Dam as the obsession that most transformed his preoccupations and stylistic approach, shifting something essential about the director's cinema and providing a turning point to those interested in retrospective readings. So, it's only logical that this epic would linger there, mulling over the land and the people, the ruins now lost to the rising waters.

When it moves on, you feel the reverberations of a loud crack, more a chasm than a conventional chapter break. Afterward, Caught by the Tides will introduce entirely new footage, tracing its characters to the China of today and a COVID-beset world. One could expect more text now that the filmmaker is liberated from the constraints of pre-existing material, but the restraint remains. If anything, the silent becomes more emphatic, the camera increasingly obsessed with the universes to be found in Zhao Tao's shifting expression. In close-up, it's impossible to deny the power of her presence, a personification of Jia's passions, its conduit and subject. 

Hers is a face meant to be on the big screen, and if, by some trick of destiny, she had never found her way to the movies, it would have been a loss whose magnitude can't be overstated. Jia knows this well. Caught by the Tides is the final form of his epic poems for and about the actress, gifting her a final act that may come to be remembered as her finest hour. Cinema history and the personal canon, a national journey, and an artist's besotted gaze come together for a punchy ending that can best be described as Jia's answer to Fellini's Cabiria. However, Qiao Qiao doesn't smile through tears or shatter her soul before our eyes. Instead, she accepts the end of a love story whose closing chapter came long ago. Her present realization is an epilogue. But not to her own tale. As she runs through snowfall, defiant and resolute, one senses that her journey will never end. Just like China's and just like Jia's, for as long as he can hold the camera, standing observant in the country he calls home.