Film of the Week #11: Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke's latest is an experimental nostalgia trip that unfortunately confirms a trend of artistic decline.
I have been slowly giving up on Jia Zhangke. Whenever he has a fiction feature coming out, I huff an ounce of hopium and grab a ticket, but each successive film from 2013’s A Touch of Sin onwards has been increasingly disappointing. One can endlessly speculate on the causes of an artistic decline – whether they might be external (institutional forces) or internal (personal or psychological changes). But whatever the circumstances, the loss is ours. For a cinéphile, showing up to the films of a director you once greatly admired and repeatedly finding them lacking is bound to cause some grief, comparable perhaps to the grief of growing apart from a friend. And with Jia I’ve had to gradually come to the realization that the man has become a stranger to me.
Jia’s latest, Caught by the Tides, is a sort of conceptual mixtape of his films leading up the this one, combining new footage shot during the pandemic with outtakes and excised scenes from classics such as 2000’s Platform and 2006’s Still Life (among others) to tell a decades-spanning sentimental love story between Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Guo Bin (Li Zhubin). Despite positioning itself as a victory lap of sorts for Jia’s directorial career, the film was for me an occasion for mourning – the side-by-side comparison of his early, funny style and his late, serious style made it clear to me that Jia has come down quite a long way from the peak of his artistic powers. While I may still make attempts to appreciate the new Jia, at this point it feels prudent to lay to rest my hopes that he will make anything on the level of his early-career triumphs ever again.
Melodramatic as the preceding sentiment is, the film itself is not that bad, and, in my opinion, quite a bit more engaging than his previous fiction feature, 2018’s Ash is Purest White. The beginning is rough and confusing, but full of termite moments and documentary pleasures, a reminder of how in tune Jia was with his environment at that point in his career. Quite a few scenes of more than perfunctory interest: the long scene of women taking turns singing, the talking head interview with the singing club owner, the montage of late 90s and early 2000s nightclubs… Plucking out gems from the archive and putting them in front of an audience seemed more important to Jia than setting up the narrative, and while I struggled a bit to orient myself at first – ‘is this even going anywhere?’ – the novelty factor of watching what amounts to the director’s home videos for 20-30 minutes in a formal cinematic setting was enough to keep me interested.
Gradually, however, a narrative emerges out of the background (more via implication than via scene construction) and unused footage from past films begin to dominate, with the real story kicking off from where 2002’s Unknown Pleasures left off as Bin leaves Datong to pursue opportunities, leaving Qiao Qiao behind. Through the use of modern trickery (CGI and video remastering, I bet) and crafty editing, the film plays remarkably well as a lost film from that era, or a period piece made in modern times. (I wasn’t totally sure whether the scene of Bin repeatedly pushing Qiao Qiao back into her seat was new or old, but it oddly reminded me of the repeated up-and-down-the-stairs scene from Hong Sang-Soo’s Grass, a bit of mechanical absurdity that exists for itself and no other reason.) I personally hadn’t made the connection before that some of Zhao Tao’s roles occur in a continuous timeline, but the events of this film serve to tie them all up together in the Jia Cinematic Universe (JCU for short): Qiao Qiao from Unknown Pleasures is the same Qiao Qiao from Still Life who goes to the Three Gorges area during the construction of the Dam to find Bin, which removes a bit of mystery from the Still Life character that I had quite enjoyed contemplating up until now. By connecting the events of the two films, the love story between Qiao Qiao and Bin thus is made to somewhat resemble the relationship between Hideko Takamine and Masayuki Mori in Mikio Naruse’s 1955 film Floating Clouds – a sort of unending, existential entanglement through the ages.
To the film’s credit – though I’ve resolved to keep the old films separate in my mind as a way to preserve my appreciation for them – this stitched-together narrative makes enough sense that it probably was pre-planned in some way. Even so, the difficulties of cobbling together a coherent narrative from scenes that weren’t necessarily designed to follow one another is quite apparent on the screen. For example, Jia frequently uses of title cards in place of material that was never shot; other issues in the film – the lack of emotional ebb and flow from one scene to the next, the absence of expository scenes that make clear the narrative plan, and the abruptness with which new characters or situations are introduced – speak to an unavoidable haphazardness in the film’s construction. Still, the film can be enjoyed as something of an experimental video collage, and I’m tempted to credit the editor Mathieu Laclau with finding an emotional throughline that at least makes some sense, with Qiao Qiao’s intrepid quest to find Bin charging the film with a sense of time lost, lives wasted. In a way, Caught by the Tides reminds me of those old Soviet montage movies, a little Dziga Vertov, a little Sergei Eisenstein, where the cumulative effect of the images is more important than the logic that puts them in sequence. For example, our repeated exposure to the unspeaking Qiao Qiao’s facial expressions creates an emotional baseline upon which the rest of the film relies; whether the scenes take place in Datong or Sanxia or Zhuhai, a sense of longing and sadness suffuses the scenery via her interiority.
But this emotional coherence seems to come at the cost of a sense of particularity. Even though my favorite section of the movie is the middle section (which is constructed out of Still Life outtakes) I tend to believe that my enjoyment of that section derives more from seeing Still Life again in a parallel universe version than from the new use of that story and locale. With the redefined narrative hanging over the proceedings, what the story gains in drama it loses in ambience. To be fair, the original film had the same motivating force for Qiao Qiao: she was always looking for a man, this man. But there was an openness to the search and the distinct possibility that it may lead nowhere, which gave Still Life its mysteriously universal scope: we as viewers were experiencing the world with her, and that experience itself was the true content of the film, not the story. We can even glean this artistic modus operandi in one of the new outtake scenes included here, with Qiao Qiao wandering into a Christian shelter for women and listening to their stories of suffering. What purpose could this scene have except as a digression, a revelation of a world outside of the character’s stated purposes? Despite the valiant effort to shape the Still Life footage to serve Caught by the Tides, the shots themselves from that era are already stamped with the personality of a Jia who was connected to both the broad, overarching emotional journey of the character as well as the lively, at times tragic, at times comic, at all times finely-observed incidences that by in large populate our time spent with her. Thus when the film finally lands on the newly shot footage, taking us into the present day, my disappointment is immeasurable.
In truth, the film’s major defect – a weak relationship to recognizable reality – doesn’t become wholly apparent until we reach the newly shot footage, which feels nauseatingly sanitized and detached. On the surface, the film appears to engage in a meeting between then and now, young and old; in doing so, the film attempts to incorporate the contemporary moment in the same spirit as Jia did in his previous films. Zhou You (whom I shall continue to think of as Wei Shujun’s actor) shows up to caricature the new generation of Chinese people – influencer, TikTok, product placement, you’ve already seen this scene; the pandemic is in the background, masks are on everywhere, people are lining up to get swabbed, though in an oddly orderly fashion; Qiao Qiao works at a supermarket and befriends a weirdly philosophical robot. But these observations feel impersonal, devoid of interpretation, and indistinguishable from a few headlines grabbed while doom-scrolling Weibo.
Perhaps Jia still thinks of himself as being on the pulse of the times, but someone should try to convince him otherwise, as his engagement with contemporary events and happenings feels woefully conceptual, as if experienced from a distant remove of a pundit gathering data for this week’s presentation on “the current moment.” There are some bright spots in this last section, in particular the shots of Bin wandering the street with regrets on his mind, the times having passed him by. His final meeting with Qiao Qiao, a touch overly sentimental though it may be, does not provide easy closure to their story, instead conveying a strong sense of people being forgotten and left behind, a theme that shows up quite regularly in Jia’s films.
Bin’s story arc in the last section shows that Jia’s concerns haven’t changed; rather, it is his approach to making those concerns alive and present that has changed. Whereas before, he was able to situate his themes and emotions within a broader cultural and physical context that felt present and lived-in, he now strains to find a convincing world for his characters to inhabit, with the result that his characters are floating in space, untethered to a realistic social environment. The issue is that I don’t know if Jia really sees this as a problem, or if the generalizing tendency of his recent work is viewed by him as a positive development. I may continue to check in with Jia, who at any rate is still in my book one of the greatest mainland Chinese directors of his generation. But at this point I am pessimistic that his work will ever again contain the qualities that made me admire him in the first place.