Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides

Tides opens in 2001, the year that Jia got his hands on a digital camera for the first time and began shooting off-the-cuff alternative and extra scenes with his actors and a skeleton crew in an experiment he’d carry on conducting right up until the pandemic shut the world down. In the first third of Tides, Zhao’s Qiaoqiao, a twentysomething actress and model, and Guo Bin (Li Zhubin), her boyfriend and agent, clash—and he disappears. In second third, set in 2006, Qiaoqiao goes looking for him, just as Zhao’s Shen Hong went searching for her husband in Still Life. And in the final third, it’s 2022, and Qiaoqiao and Guo Bin find each other where it all started, in the northern Chinese city of Datong.

Gilman senses in Tides a kind of summing up, a notion that Jia has confirmed in interviews. He’d originally planned to shape the footage of extemporaneously staged scenarios into a narrative that he’d complete when he retired way down the line, but when the pandemic hit, “I thought,” he tells Sara Merican at Deadline, “that it was the right historical moment and juncture to bring this project to a close.” Working with editors Yang Chao, Xudong Lin, and Matthieu Laclau, he sorted through around a thousand hours of footage to create the first two thirds of Tides before shooting the third.

“There’s an intriguing self-reflexivity to this sprawling, mostly wordless story that calls attention to the discrete visual styles and social conditions of the evolving times through the lens of the director’s own fictions, in which Zhao Tao remains a fixed presence,” writes Beatrice Loayza for Film Comment. “As Qiaoqiao, we see Zhao as a young model with blunt bangs; a barge-riding drifter in search of her missing love; and a weary, COVID-19–era cashier who passes through luxe commercial centers staffed by robots. She never speaks, giving her character a mime-like quality—a certain scrappiness and contained wisdom—that simultaneously distinguishes her from the masses and melds her with them in their silent unknowability.”

It’s the self-reflexivity that makes Tides “a relative disappointment” for Giovanni Marchini Camia in Sight and Sound, but Jordan Cronk, introducing his interview with Jia for Film Comment, finds that this new film is “among the fifty-four-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to date.” Particularly in the final third, “Jia turns the depopulated streets and sanitized interiors of the city during the pandemic into a vaguely futuristic space pregnant with possibility—one where this estranged couple can finally reconvene, if only to realize that the world, and their relationship to it, is much different now.”

“While it’s a through line in his work, Caught by the Tides unequivocally reveals Jia’s knack for capturing what is on the brink of vanishing under the crushing forces of history,” writes William Repass at Slant. “The film is riddled with haunting interstices—architectural remnants of another time, liminal spaces, tenements, and street corners that seem empty even when full of people.”

For Pietro Bianchi at e-flux, “what makes Jia’s film so fascinating is the dialectic between the characters and their historical context—or, one could say, between the foreground and the background.” Jia, Bianchi suggests, “inverts” that relationship. “We are driven to look first and foremost at Chinese history, and especially at how—from China’s entrance into the WTO in the early 2000s, to the Three Gorges Dam project, the Beijing Olympics, and the contemporary world of surveillance, loneliness, and artificial intelligence—a certain idea of the future was betrayed. The generation that believed Chinese industrial development and wealth would bring emancipation has become lost. With Caught by the Tides, it’s as if Jia is telling us that the core of his previous films was not the narrative structure but the long shots in the background.”

Jia might well disagree. “I feel neither responsibility nor the ability to reflect the complex realities of Chinese society,” he tells Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “Personally, I’m more interested in people and their experiences, how they live, what kind of pains and joys they experience. This is where my ultimate attention lies, and I try to film their lives in an honest way. My characters happen to live in China, so if the audience feels like they have a deeper understanding of China thanks to my films, then I can only say I’m flattered. But bear in mind that my starting point is always people rather than country.”

Jia will deliver this year’s Amos Vogel Lecture at the New York Film Festival this evening and then take part in Q&As following screenings of Tides tonight and tomorrow. The film will screen once more at the NYFF on Thursday and then head to festivals in London,Los Angeles,Chicago, and Denver.