Caught by the Tides (2025)

4 Stars (out of 4)

Wave Lengths

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

At first I didn't quite know how to respond to Jia Zhang-ke's Caught by the Tides. If I have my information correct, the film is comprised of some random test footage shot by the director, scenes lifted intact from his finished films, notably Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, alternate takes from his films, and about 30 minutes of new footage. It may seem like a collection of "B" sides more than a cohesive album, but the more we stick with it, the more it comes together as a masterful movie of Jia's themes and concerns. The movie has been compared to Linklater's Boyhood, but it reminded me more of Jafar Panahi's recent, clandestine movies, shot in secret.

There's a plot, sort of. Jia's wife and muse Zhao Tao, whom we see in footage from 2001, 2006, and 2022, plays Qiaoqiao. Her lover Bin (Li Zhubin) decides to leave, and she decides to look for him. That's about it, really, although along the way we witness change, sometimes subtle, sometimes tumultuous, as with the massive Three Gorges Dam project that displaced over a million people. Technology is a theme as well, not only onscreen, but in the various grades of film and video we witness as times go by. (Jia includes a couple of moments in the 2022 section that seem like a robot is in charge of the zoom lens, tracking and darting and trying to find some place to settle.)

Other tech comes into play, including the aforementioned robot. In 2006, Qiaoqiao sees an ad for a robot, and in 2022, she encounters an actual robot working in a supermarket. In early scenes, people hang out together and sing songs. In later scenes, people dance to songs on TikTok. Indeed, viewing the 2022 footage from the starting point of 2001 makes it look like such dystopian times, with everyone wearing masks, and hospital visits relegated to video chats. But Jia is hardly railing against change or dredging up nostalgia for the past. He's merely tracking change, and how his characters change with it. Moreover, Qiaoqiao never speaks a word during Caught by the Tides, as if saying something might ruin the ride.