It’s nearly impossible to watch Jia Zhang-ke’s new film, Caught by the Tides — a fractured, circumstantial portrait of the Chinese quotidian in the 21st century — without thinking about how he made it: retrospectively, so the film is from the start as much about Jia’s filmmaking arc as it is about his country. Jia is one of those movieheads who never leaves home without a camera, and his compulsive art-life has over the past quarter-century accumulated a storehouse of footage, in addition to his over two dozen films (shorts and features). As with C.S. Lewis’s dictum, “We do not write to be understood, we write to understand” (how I wish someone else had said that), Jia’s grand subject has been China itself, on the streets and in the clubs and on the rivers, and he always understood it by filming. In the process, documentary reality, mixed seamlessly with fiction, has been a salient ingredient in his films from the get-go. So, stuck in 2022 with the pandemic, Jia began fashioning a portrait in time, beginning with impromptu footage he shot in Datong City, a neglected northern mining burg, in 2001, while making Unknown Pleasures (2002).
The result is a recognizably Jia-esque odyssey, brimming with prowling camera pans, musical detours, documentary asides, and poetic iconography. But this time, Jia’s own trajectory is baked in, as the foremost “Sixth Generation” filmmaker, who most decidedly refocused Chinese filmmaking away from the mythic-historical showmanship that overtook the Fifth Generation of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, in the ’90s. Jia’s film is better history, given its raw materials as time-stamped documentation, whether the footage is the in-the-moment nonfiction of disinterested Chinese civilians or outtakes and whole scenes lifted and recontextualized from Unknown Pleasures, Still Life (2006), and Ash Is Purest White (2018). Every shot, then, reverbs with multiple significances, and Jia lets the associations float and dangle.
With her fierce silence and sphinx-y stare, Zhao is always hypnotic.
A narrative does coalesce, and it’s predictably centered on laser-eyed actress Zhao Tao, Mrs. Jia, who has starred in all of Jia’s films since Platform (2000). First, Zhao is the for-hire club girl from Unknown Pleasures, glancing romantically off a small-time hood (Li Zhubin) and making a fraught living promo-dancing in the industrial outlands. Then we jump five years or so, in the context of Zhao’s thread in Still Life, in which her mute wanderer searches for her husband (Li) around the scenic enclaves of Fengjie, as it is slowly subsumed by the rising Yangtze after the erection of the Three Gorges Dam. Many digressions and observances later, it’s mid-Covid 2022 and we’re following Li’s masked near-elderly job-hunter flying south to visit his hospital-bound brother (then to be schooled in the profiteering of TikTok by his snarky nephew), before returning north, where his path intersects with ex-wife Zhao, older and still speechless, working as a supermarket cashier in a new China replete with bountiful Westernized retail offerings and facial-recognition service robots.
With her fierce silence and sphinx-y stare, Zhao, essentially incarnating a single woman over four films and nearly a quarter-century, is always hypnotic, but in this assemblage she’s less a character than a guide figure, a historical witness like the ghost-Marquis in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), all the more bedeviling for her younger selves, their evaporation into the past, and her literal occupation of the history Jia was both recording (especially in Still Life) and making cinematically. Around her, it’s China that’s surging and bustling, slowly emerging from the hardcore Maoist detritus of the 20th century and blooming — Jia seems delighted, if jaded — into a commercialized, affluent, opportunity-rich modern society.
As with any work that recycles its precedents, Caught by the Tides runs the risk of inviting distraction, reminding you as you watch how great the earlier Jia films are — particularly Still Life, which created mysterious mythic fictions from inside the monolithic slo-mo cataclysm of the infamous dam project, which displaced millions and left countless towns and cities, many thousands of years old, permanently underwater. The metaphoric fusion of unforgiving landscape, cosmic institutional hubris, and sprawling refugee fallout seemed, in 2006, too much for one movie to contain — and apparently, Jia agreed, returning here in the new film’s lengthy midsection to the long-disappeared mountainside life-throng when the water was still rising, revisiting the imagery as if he wasn’t quite done understanding what happened. He’s a gift of a historian — this is the way it was, Jia’s new film declares, this is the way it has been, and all of it would be drowned or buried in memory, even the grime of old Datong City at the turn of the century, if it weren’t in fact on film. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.