Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Time and Tide
By Forrest Cardamenis

New York Film Festival 2024:
Caught by the Tides
Dir. Jia Zhang-ke, China, Janus Films/Sideshow

The promise of narrative fiction is a promise of containment, a way of making sense of the world. But how could any such work, however long, include everything we need for a task so gargantuan? It is precisely the impossibility of making sense of the world through fiction that is foregrounded in the inadvertent, decades-long production of Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, which carefully, gradually mixes fiction and documentary.The first section of the film, set in the mining town of Datong, consists almost entirely of footage Jia shot between 2001 and 2006—of bus stations, ballrooms, bars, clubs and wherever else, plus some footage and outtakes from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures (his first collaboration with Tides star Zhao Tao). The next part takes place in Fengjie during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and is a similarly archival affair, consisting of material from the productions of Still Life and Ash Is Purest White, which share its setting and timeframe. Only the last section, shot post-COVID, contains original images.

Tides has garnered comparisons to Richard Linklater’s twelve-year Boyhood, but the differences are legion. Jia never planned to make the film over 20 years, meaning it lacks the narrative thrust of Boyhood, aiming instead to document the times of its shooting. Similarly, there is a lack of cohesion, or perhaps of resolution, to the assembly: shooting formats are mixed freely, and the middle section in particular, pulled from two films released 12 years apart, can be jarring, especially as Zhao’s age visibly toggles. The absence of narrative focus and these visual inconsistencies work in the film’s favor, however, calling attention to its mode of production and reminding us that there are always other images on the cutting room floor or that were never captured in the first place. We are past the point of being able to encapsulate China in the confines of a narrative film, and any attempt to do so is insufficient. Some ideas require other modes of expression.

Jia confronts the reality of 21st-century China and its relationship to Western culture by turning to music. Caught by the Tides is not a musical as we normally think of one, but it does, like the Hollywood genre, use music to freeze its narrative and express what other artistic forms cannot. If this feels like a stretch—after all, Jia’s style offers his characters, often struggling to stay afloat, little to sing about—it’s worth recalling what Jeff Reichert asked in these pages of Tsai Ming-liang, another eminent figure of East Asian cinema whose films address encroaching globalization. “Why does [his] camera linger so long(ingly) if not to suggest that perhaps there’s something essential missing from all of his carefully composed images? [...] What are musical numbers good for if not to allow characters to express those things the narrative cannot contain?”

Of Jia, we could ask related questions: At what point does the transformation he has chronicled—traversing the 21st century and China’s geography throughout his career—become too immense for a single story to contain? And what better way to depict its evolving relationship to the West than through the appropriation of a distinctly American cultural form? Jia does not go quite as far as Tsai, who aped the conventions of the classical Hollywood musical with his inclusion of nondiegetic musical numbers, but he has long depicted China’s collision with the west via music, from the use of “Misirlou” as a Pulp Fiction homage in Unknown Pleasures to Zhao Tao dancing to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” as the bookends of Mountains May Depart. It’s hardly a surprise that, as the entity of “China” becomes too large, too powerful, too modern, and too complex to reduce, he turns again toward music to express the inexpressible.

The film’s title card is accompanied by a Chinese metal song unlike anything heard in a Jia film before, and the first sequence shows multiple women singing a Shanxi opera song—two genres about as far apart as one could imagine. While the Datong section begins in earnest with a silent Qiao Qiao (Zhao) fending off harassment from a gang of bikers, the rest consists primarily of karaoke and dance in the locales Jia filmed approximately 20 years ago. Amidst these sequences, the outline of a story not unlike that of Ash Is Purest White or Mountains May Depart emerges, with Qiao/Zhao and Bin (Li Zhubin) scheming—sometimes together but just as often, we sense, without full regard for one another—their next moves in an unsteady world promising infinite opportunity. We also are treated to more footage of the contemporaneous reaction to Beijing being selected as the site of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, a moment that occupied but a tiny (albeit crucial) segment of Unknown Pleasures and announces China’s entry into the modernized world. Unlike in Ash or Mountains, however, these inklings of narrative are easy to miss. We are asked to pay less attention to plot specifics and much more for the way people dance, dress, talk and sing.

Among those dancers, dressers, and singers is Qiao/Zhao, who eventually finds herself following Bin to Fengjie, where he seeks wealth and power. She communicates with him via text to facilitate a rendezvous. (Save for a brief moment of singing early on, Zhao is silent throughout the film, as if under a spell, observing a nation’s collective memory.) The similarities between Tides and Ash Is Purest White, which includes almost this exact plot point and a similar set-up (although nobody fires a gun or goes to prison), continue to pile up, but the films are inverted in one crucial way. Ash chronicles China’s modernization through one figure on the margins of society, confused but determined to stake her claim in a world that is becoming unrecognizable to her. This time around, the changing face of China becomes the primary subject, with one figure caught in the tide as if by happenstance.

Godard’s truism that every film is a documentary of its actors takes on new meanings in Caught by the Tides, which collapses the boundary between actress and character. Neither Jia nor Zhao intended these gestures, movements, and clothing for this new character, yet they translate onto the screen in full service of this creation. Jia has long woven his characters’ stories into China’s reality in a manner that provides no shortage of latent commentary, but Tides further complicates that relationship between fiction and documentary. For the first two-thirds of the film, fiction is rendered in service of documentary rather than vice-versa, while the final third reverses the relationship, forcing us to read the ensuing tale of (spurred) connection anew. If Jia and Zhao’s earlier collaborations were documentaries of their own making, Tides is a fiction made of that documentary.

Even when Jia turns to footage shot specifically for this film, he maintains an elliptical approach to narrative. The concluding contemporary episode is as much a document of China under lockdown as it is the end of an anti-romance. One humorous sequence includes a radio broadcast bluntly criticizing the American failure to implement and enforce containment measures while security personnel scan temperatures with a laser thermometer. Rarely have the twin failures of narcissistic libertarianism and authoritarian safety theater been so effectively juxtaposed. Accordingly, few sequences in Jia’s filmography reveal the paradoxical dynamic of China’s relationship with America so succinctly. If The World exposes a nation’s anxiety about entering an international economy it spent decades opposing, Caught by the Tides rediscovers that anxiety in the realization that, in our multipolar world order, China is not so far from the America that stands as its foil.

This cinematic coup also would not be possible had Jia not made so many films with Zhao, as it is the longevity of their partnership that allows them to excavate the art they have made together in search of new meanings. We see the careful inhibitions of Qiao’s youth because they were Zhao’s, even if for another role; we see Qiao age because Zhao aged; we see Qiao’s face acquire confidence and world-weariness because Zhao’s face has too. By this third section, when Zhao is purposefully acting her character for the first time, it’s impossible to uncouple the resilience in the eyes of Qiao, pulled into this strange new world, from the resilience in the eyes of Zhao (through a COVID mask, no less, in one of the most remarkable screen performances in years), aging gracefully and defiantly before us, so thoroughly has reality become art and vice versa.

This meta-cinematic commentary is also something much rarer: a testament to the value of art as a collaborative practice. As the financial health of the film industry deteriorates, it will necessitate smaller crews, fewer shooting days, and various other constraints. There are active and acclaimed directors who are already navigating these obstacles by making “smaller” films in which the director and other artists take on more responsibilities—fellow 2024 NYFF selectees Hong Sang-soo and Nicolás Pereda are two examples—but Caught by the Tides expands the possibilities of this method. It represents a different kind of film that can emerge from such unorthodox methods and stands as a testament to the medium’s long-term possibilities.

Throughout Caught by the Tides, the music keeps playing. In the third section, Bin, still chasing his big break, tries to have his viral moment by singing and dancing to a remix of “Dschinghis Khan” on TikTok. It’s a humorous scene—albeit a pitiful one—of a man still trying desperately to get noticed even as his initial reaction to the very phrase “going viral on TikTok” underscores that the world has passed him by. “Dschinghis Khan” is a 1979 Eurodisco track featured in Jia’s Platform, and its usage here in the form most representative of a globalized music culture—the electronic remix—is at once emblematic of the relationship between east and west (a growing equality in access to pop culture paired with unmet promises of economic equality) and of Jia’s artistic thesis. Twenty-four years after it was used in a movie depicting China’s 20th century evolution, the song, different but recognizable, now soundtracks the rapid developments of the 21st century. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We might never make sense of these changes, but we can choose to meet them with either the desperation of Bin or the defiant optimism of Qiao/Zhao. That choice aside, the most we can do is bear witness. And dance.