Caught by the Tides review – moving, stirring, brilliant

There have been a surfeit of films in recent years by older auteurs looking back, in one way or another, at their legacies. From Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, the trend of the decade is for filmmakers of an advanced age to reckon with their filmographies. Jia Zhangke is only 54, but he breaks the mould with Caught by the Tides, a radical reconstruction of some of his earliest work.

It follows lovers Qiao (Jia muse Zhao Tao) and Bin (Li Zhubin) across two decades as they drift in and out of each other’s lives, eventually reconnecting during Covid. The film’s first two acts consist of footage shot during the productions of Jia’s 2002 film Unknown Pleasures and his 2006 film Still Life, which starred both Zhao and Li as different characters. Jia recontextualises these scenes as part of one continuous narrative, which concludes with new material shot in 2022. Many of these scenes were deleted from his earlier films, but some of them are simply reused from the earlier works, given new meaning through, among other things, silent film-style intertitles and on-screen text messages.

It’s a fitting development for Jia, who frequently remixes ideas and characters from previous works. His last narrative feature, Ash is Purest White, also featured Zhao as a woman named Qiao who meets a criminal named Bin and has a decades-spanning romantic relationship with him, although Bin was played by another actor there. In Caught by the Tides, a Still Life-era scene has Qiao brandish a taser in much the same way she wields a gun in Ash is Purest White. In 2006, Qiao watches a CGI film about a robot who cannot feel sadness. In 2022, she meets a real robot in a grocery store with an uncanny grasp of human emotions.

The effect of seeing Zhao and Li age 20 years in the span of two hours is striking, even more so because of the cameras on which Jia shot those older films. The Unknown Pleasures-era scenes are grainy and juddery video, while the Still Life footage has a sharper HD look. With the 4K scenes at the end, Caught by the Tides becomes a full-spectrum history of digital filmmaking. More compelling, though, is how Jia uses the smoothening of the imagery as a metaphor for aging. Qiao and Bin are young when the film begins, in their twenties with energy and passion to spare. The first act is full of clubbing, partying, and hot tempers, a portrait of shiftless youth much more abstract than the film from which it takes its footage. By the end, Qiao and Bin are old and slow, dignified but uncool. Both they and the 4K images have more clarity, but less edge.

The film is glued together by Zhao, one of cinema’s most enthralling actors, accomplishing the herculean task of creating a coherent character out of multiple disparate and decades-old performances. She’s able to convey emotions with the subtlest facial movements, even (and most impressively) when covered by a mask in the Covid-era scenes. More than a retrospective of his own work, Caught by the Tides is a loving tribute by Jia to his most meaningful collaborator.