REVIEW: Caught by the Tides (2024) dir. Jia Zhangke

I am unaware of a director anywhere in the world who has more thoroughly and philosophically navigated the complicated contradictions of the contemporary world than Jia Zhangke, a titan of the Chinese Sixth Generation and one of the world’s leading political filmmakers. He never approached his project to film modern life in a modernizing and technologizing 21st-century China from a place of simplistic dichotomies or myopic ideologies. His fluidity around political binaries has helped him to avoid becoming a state propagandist while never being adopted as the party’s favorite filmmaker either. His newest released film, Caught by the Tides, is the apotheosis of his life’s work and one of the most profound and emotional wrestlings with one’s own artistic catalogue ever released.

Jia’s films can never be summarized the way most narrative fictional films can be, and that’s because he also avoids narrative conventions as well as he avoids political ones. His partnership with Zhao Tao, his wife and life-long artistic collaborator, is the most consistent throughline in his filmography. Her name means “waves” in Chinese, and Caught by the Tides more or less rides the waves of her life. We watch her age across 25 years as Jia reuses footage and outtakes from his old films (mostly Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and Ash is Purest White), decades old footage for a project he began but never completed called Man with a Digital Camera, an obvious reference to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and original pandemic-era material. The younger Zhao loves a man named Guo Bin (Li Zhubin, also in the older films), and he runs away from Datong to Fenyang, where Zhao searches for Guo and eventually leaves him for good. They meet decades later in pandemic-China.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.