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.
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.
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.
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.
Caught by the Tides delves even deeper into the metaphysics of texting, and the terrible, intimate proximity between instant access and enduring loneliness.
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.
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