Game recognizes game: Martin Scorsese once called Jia Zhangke’s body of work “the finest, toughest, most vitally alive work in modern moviemaking.” It’s a high compliment, but Jia’s cinema—not only tough, fine, and vital, but slippery, sophisticated, and ambitious, matching form to function and reach to grasp—measures up. (For those looking to catch up with his work, the Criterion Channel is hosting a well-curated online retrospective this month.)
Born in the rural town of Fenyang and educated at the Beijing Film School (where he made a student short film about the tourist trade in Tiananmen Square), Jia has carried the mantle of popular Chinese art cinema since 1997—the year of the Hong Kong handover and of Xiao Wu, a shoestring feature debut that served as his cinematic coming-out party. More specifically, the film, named for and tethered to the movements of a feckless, penny-ante pickpocket, cast its then-27-year-old director as a designated tour guide through a rapidly modernizing society. Shot at street level and produced stubbornly beyond the purview of state censorship, Xiao Wu wore its outlaw ambitions on its sleeve and ended up being banned in China. More than anything, it felt like a movie made by somebody trying to get away with something, a quality recalling young Scorsese at his hungriest.
In the similarly scrappy but increasingly magisterial features that followed—like 2000’s decades-spanning social panorama Platform, about a staunchly Maoist 1970s folk music group that goes electric by the end of the neon 1980s—Jia held fast to his chosen trajectory of wry social commentary marked by adventurous stylistic detours. He is an inveterate and agile experimenter (and former breakdancer) who plays freely and mischievously in the interstices between fiction and documentary. Sometimes, there’s a self-reflexive twist, as in 2002’s Unknown Pleasures, in which a street vendor proffers customers a pirated DVD copy of Xiao Wu. Elsewhere, Jia’s sleight of hand is more discombobulating: 24 City (2008) is ostensibly a documentary about a disused munitions factory turned apartment complex, but it blithely mixes actual talking-head testimonies with scripted interviews.
Beyond its ontological head fake, 24 City exemplified Jia’s belief in location shooting as a form of storytelling. He has a particular interest in the expressive qualities of manufactured landscapes, like the real-life miniaturized theme-park monuments clustered together in the globalist satire The World (2004) and the blasted, almost science-fictional expanse of the Three Gorges Dam in Still Life. And Jia observes, but never quite reconciles, the contradictions of the twenty-first century through an array of lenses: microscopic and panoramic; fine-grained celluloid and pixelated digital. Jia is as freewheeling in his medium as Bob Dylan, and as attuned to the texture and tempo of times a-changin’. Of all the significant international filmmakers who began their careers after the proverbial “end of history,” he has consistently displayed the keenest and most intuitive sense of the moment. His great subject is flux itself.
There are bits and pieces of most of Jia’s films floating through Caught by the Tides, an ingenious exercise in montage that repurposes two decades’ worth of unseen, unused, or otherwise repurposed footage into an elliptical and attenuated tale of separation anxiety. The movie’s plot is simple: A woman searches determinedly through time and space for her feckless lover, who keeps eluding her at every turn. The assembly, however, is almost impossibly complex, integrating various outtakes, behind-the-scenes hijinks, and glancing urban verité alongside spontaneous, unrehearsed sequences featuring Jia’s wife and frequent leading lady, Zhao Tao, opposite her recurring co-star Li Zhu. This pile-up, over the years, of so much peripheral material suggests the looseness of Jia’s process, as well as his curiosity, which got yoked early on to the freedom of shooting on digital. “We were enthusiastic about the potential of digital cameras,” Jia explained recently to Variety of his salad days. “It was just young people making fun of each other and playing around.”
That so much loose footage ends up feeling of a piece testifies simultaneously to the resourceful editing (by Yang Chao, Xudong Lin, and Matthieu Laclau) and the consistency of Jia’s preoccupations from youth into middle age. Imagine a career-spanning greatest-hits album made up of rough-hewn B-sides, and you’re in the right conceptual territory; to extend the Dylan analogy, Caught by the Tides finds Jia rifling through his voluminous back pages.
Auteurism is a potent art-house lure, and a certain demographic will always be happy to watch talented filmmakers repeat themselves. Still, it’s hard to say how Caught by the Tides will play for the uninitiated. Jia’s most commercial films to date have been crime stories, like A Touch of Sin (2013), which melded together a series of violent, ripped-from-the-headlines narratives into a (Scorsesean) tapestry, and Ash Is Purest White (2019), about an underworld moll tracking down her wayward lover. The percolating menace of those films is evoked in the prologue of Caught by the Tides, which opens with a glimpse of a lone motorcyclist staring down a distant factory complex at dusk, pipe wrench in hand and a small blaze visible in the middle distance. The feeling is one of dread: “Not even a wildfire can burn all the weeds,” reads an opening title card. “They’ll grow back in the spring breeze.”
Swiftly, the motorcyclist disappears, replaced by our true protagonist, Qiaoqiao (Zhao), a part-time model and singer living and working in the dusty industrial suburb of Datong. In the first section of the film, shot in the second half of 2001—parallel to the announcement of the Beijing Olympics and China’s momentous entry into the World Trade Organization—we see Qiaoqiao living for the moment, wriggling energetically across makeshift runways and bouncing happily in the club. (In a movie where music serves as an important temporal marker, the pounding electronic dance music in the prologue is like a time capsule that you slip under your tongue.) Where Qiaoqiao is a free spirit, her semi-domesticated party-animal boyfriend, Guo Bin (Li) is more reserved; she bounces and he slouches, locked into his body and trapped in his head. It transpires that Bin is bored and harbors fantasies of success in the developing metropolises to the south. Taciturn at the best of times, he stays tight-lipped about his plans for departure until the very last moment, at which point he drops his lover a text. “I want to leave and have a try on the outside,” he types, before skipping town.
The spiritual deprivation of being left on read has already figured into a few twenty-first-century movies, from Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper to Unfriended. These movies equated ghosting with supernatural forces, but Caught by the Tides delves even deeper into the metaphysics of texting and the terrible, intimate proximity between instant access and enduring loneliness. There’s also a practical consideration: Because so much of the movie’s first two-thirds is made up of fragments, the texts—sent mostly one way, from Qiaoqiao to Bin—work to suture them together. They also work as contemporary iterations of silent-movie intertitles, an efficient and wonderfully evocative way of bridging Jia’s career and a more distant cinematic past.
Caught by the Tides’ explicit kinship to a bygone style of moviemaking—one with a very different idea of character psychology, precisely attuned to physical gesture and unspoken subtext—gets embodied in Qiaoqiao’s lonely and woebegone constancy as she decamps from Datong to Fenjie to try to catch up with Bin. The idea of a silent female protagonist shuffling wordlessly through a world indifferent to her isolation skirts art-house cliché; it’s easy enough to draw a blank and call it portraiture. Pauline Kael used to rip Antonioni for what she perceived as his chicly somnambulistic protagonists, and there is a sense in which Qiaoqiao is a modern sleepwalker; in one passage, shot circa 2006, we see her looking droopily at a television playing a CGI-heavy blockbuster, nodding out with her cell phone gripped loosely between her fingers. Qiaoqiao’s weariness as she pursues her lover across vast expanses of space and time—intervals marked by visible gradations of fashion, architecture, and technology—belies Zhao’s preternatural alertness as a performer, the extraordinary way she takes in her surroundings and leads our gaze with her own. Even when she’s being filmed in what must have been an offhand context—wandering the shores of the Yangtze in long shot or eating noodles in silent repose—Zhao is magnetic. For Caught by the Tides to work beyond its gimmick, we have to believe that Qiaoqiao could spend so many years keeping to herself while cutting a steady swath through the decades; Zhao uses her flickers of expressivity judiciously. When Qiaoqiao encounters a stranger offering her blessings on what has so far been a futile odyssey, her face brightens, crumples, and resolves itself in an instant; the fluidity of her reaction is like a flesh-and-blood special effect.
To ensure that we’re fully focused on Qiaoqiao’s eyes—and cued to see the world through them—Jia has Zhao act the bulk of the film’s final section from behind a Covid mask, a documentary detail evoking uncanny sensations of mute, helpless witness. The pandemic backdrop also underscores the significant science fiction motif running throughout Caught by the Tides, in which Qiaoqiao’s eyes-wide-shut viewing of the robot movie in 2006 presages her encountering a mechanized supermarket greeter circa 2022—a benign emissary from a weirdly Spielbergian future that we realize has been rushing up to meet her (and us) all along.
That there’s more recognition—and connection—in Qiaoqiao’s scenes with this real-life WALL-E than in her long-delayed, and purposefully underwhelming, reunion with Bin suits Jia’s trademark fatalism. He remains a master of aching and open-ended anticlimax. Still, it would be reductive to call a movie as expansive and Caught by the Tides a downer; if anything, the final moments vibrate with curiosity about what lies beyond the frame, and where Jia and Zhao might go next. The startling, wryly funny wind-up calls directly back to the opening epigram’s cryptic promises of renewal, and of a spark that cannot be extinguished. The difference is that instead of carrying a torch for somebody else, Qiaoqiao is, finally, moving under her own steam, a still life on the run, achieving serene velocity.