A Narrative 20 Years in Motion: Jia Zhang-ke's Caught by the Tides

Unless you follow the festival circuit closely or are one of the more adventurous subscribers to the Criterion Channel, you may not have heard of Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke (贾樟柯). However, for nearly thirty years, Jia has been making quiet epics, exploring domestic relationships against the backdrops of a changing society and genre influences.

For his tenth feature film (eleventh if you count his student featurette, Xiaoshan Going Home), Jia has made what is perhaps his most ambitious project yet. While some might dismiss his musings in Caught by the Tides as pretentious, contextualized within the scope of the rest of his work it’s an intriguing, often profound, and always intimate film that feels like the culmination of his career thus far.

Jia’s latest film tells the story of Qiaoqiao (Tao Zhao) and Bin (Zhubin Li), two star-crossed lovers kept apart by fate. Through the years, they drift through life, dancing, singing, ruminating on love and purpose, and navigating the mundanity of adulthood. It’s not a very conventional narrative, but the decades-spanning romance most closely resembles the structure of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast — we see glimpses of their love: the joys of nights out, the lows of fights, and everything in-between. Jia then assembles these fragments in an essayistic manner to be something like a portrait of their relationship.

Caught by the Tides, like most of Jia’s filmography, defies the conventional labels of genre. Its story is a romance, but the film also contains elements of social realist drama exploring the grounded reality of modern China, as well as documentary with its use of fly-on-the-wall footage of non-actors throughout. There are also some genre elements, including snippets of a crime saga in a brief gangster subplot involving Bin and a borderline sci-fi storyline exploring the growing role of artificial intelligence in Chinese society.

The more interesting blend Jia achieves in Caught by the Tides, though, is his combination of fictional, nonfictional, and metafictional elements. The film has the central fictional romance, but Jia also captures real people in the filming locations in which his past work was set — especially his own home province of Shanxi — in documentary footage depicting their daily lives working, singing, and dancing, conveying the emotional and social zeitgeist of contemporary China.

What makes Caught by the Tides really special is that it sees Jia building upon his own work by referencing past works in his filmography. He uses material from his past work, as well as some unused footage, recontextualizing it into an entirely new story. It’s an ambitious approach that very few filmmakers have tried to do outside of DVD bonus features. The only recent example that pops to mind of another filmmaker doing the same thing is French provocateur Bertrand Mandico, whose duology Dragon Dilatation offers a similar blend of new and repurposed material.

The production of Caught by the Tides was no doubt a Herculean task for Jia. Most of the film is composed of outtakes and documentary footage shot during the production of his earlier films Unknown Pleasures and Ash Is Purest White, in 2001 and 2017, while a final sequence set during the COVID-19 pandemic was shot with the express purpose of completing this project. In this way, it may not be as intentional as Boyhood in its production, but it’s no less miraculous of a depiction of the passage of time.

Indeed, although it is not a direct sequel to Unknown Pleasures or Ash Is Purest White in the purest sense — the three films share no narrative continuity — the characters in Jia’s thematic trilogy have the same names and feel like permutations of each other. The relationship between the three works feels akin to Todd Solondz’s triptych of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Palindromes, and Weiner-Dog: although the films are narratively independent, they build on each other in fascinating ways.

Like all of Jia’s past films, Caught by the Tides explores the evolution of Chinese society, but what makes this project so effective is its structure. Because we are watching this evolution play out in real time over the course of two decades, it feels like a real document of the change in a society that, frankly, isn’t the most well-documented — at least not in media widely available to Westerners. We see characters and real people react to important events in Chinese history, like the country winning the bid to host the Beijing Olympics and significant social reform of the 2000s, especially related to the shifting perception of the Cultural Revolution and its leader, Mao Zedong.

Caught by the Tides — and Jia’s work in general — stands out in the context of modern Chinese cinema due to its rejection of nationalism. Many Chinese films that make their way to Western audiences, in part due to the Film Industry Promotion Act, are borderline propaganda in their depiction of Chinese society, even those by auteurs like Zhang Yimou. Jia’s work, on the other hand, engages with the complex nature of Chinese identity and the country’s history, focusing more on the human impact of these events than their political nature.

Ultimately, there are few events in recent Chinese history that are as impactful as the COVID-19 pandemic. And while there are glimpses of commentary on Chinese and international policy on the catastrophe (one PSA is overheard criticizing the US government’s early dismissal of mask-wearing policies), Jia seems much more interested in the impact that COVID-19 had on our ability to form connections with one another. We watch Qiaoqiao and Bin as they struggle to drift through a world where they can no longer interact with one another or their environment as they once did.

However, what makes Caught by the Tides stand out from other COVID-19-inspired media is that Jia’s perspective of the future seems firmly optimistic. Through motifs of exploration, such as monuments to Shenzhou 5 (China’s first manned space mission in 2003) or a playfully retrofuturist statue of an astronaut, and innovative technology like a scene involving a customer service AI, Jia purports that we will continue to find connection and love — even despite the separation we have faced.

Caught by the Tides, almost fittingly, has a tide-like rhythm; it ebbs and flows, switching seamlessly between visual styles, aspect ratios, narrative threads, and more. Jia’s use of film form is both experimental and poetic, with just as much meaning to be gleaned out of how he juxtaposes two images as what the images themselves contain. He builds meaning not through conventional story, but by evoking emotion through image, sound, and performance, creating something that feels less like a conventional film and more like experiential performance art.

That being said, for those willing to get on Jia’s unorthodox wavelength, the film still moves nicely through its 111-minute runtime, largely thanks to Jia’s propulsive use of music. In some ways, Caught by the Tides could be seen as a musical, as Jia often uses song to convey meaning and story beats. From traditional Chinese songs to pop and dance music, Jia uses a wide variety of musical styles to create an energetic atmosphere that’s consistently engaging.

At the heart of Caught by the Tides — as she was in Unknown Pleasures and Ash Is Purest White — is actress Zhao Tao (赵涛), Jia Zhang-ke’s wife and muse with whom he has worked several times since the turn of the century. Caught by the Tides is arguably Zhao’s most challenging work yet, as it is largely dialogue-free. Everyone else in the film has the speaking roles, while Zhao is primarily present to react to the world and people around her. Yet, this also allows her to express her emotional journey nonverbally, and she stands up to this task, offering a screen presence that is utterly gripping and convincing. You feel the sadness, longing, and hope that radiates in her character and performance despite her wordlessness.

Despite the fact that I made a handful of comparisons, Caught by the Tides still feels wholly unique and singular. Like some of the greatest poets, Jia takes the established conventions of the language (in this case the cinematic language) and infuses them with a new grammar that makes the work decidedly his own. This is a film that could only have been made by Jia; out of his complicated relationship with his homeland and past work, and his uncomplicated relationship with his wife/muse.

By no means is Caught by the Tides the ideal entry point for Jia’s filmography. That’s not to say you absolutely must have seen Unknown Pleasures or Ash Is Purest White to enjoy the Chinese auteur’s epic, but it certainly helps to have this context. In this way, I almost lament that this is likely to be many cinephiles’ first exposure to Jia. While it’s certainly delightful to see the work of such an idiosyncratic filmmaker get the platform of a reputable boutique distributor like Janus Films, that also means that some will stumble into their local art house cinema to see the film without doing their homework first.

But if this also means more people will go back and discover some of Jia Zhang-ke’s earlier work — whether in preparation or after the fact — the film community is all the better for it.

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