Made during the pandemic, Jia Zhangke’s latest is a clever collage of used and unused footage from previous features, as well as new footage that was shot under strict circumstances. The result is a film that attempts to review the last 20-odd years of Chinese economic development through Jia’s typically skeptical perspective and structure it as a kind of romantic tragedy. Jia’s partner, Zhao Tao, plays Qiaoqiao, a dancer-model in the northern city of Datong in 2001, the same character she played in perhaps Jia’s best film, Unknown Pleasures. Her boyfriend, Bin, a ne’er-do-well played by Li Zhubin, who was also in Unknown Pleasures and other Jia films, decides to leave town and try to take advantage of the projected economic boom. Eventually, Qiaoqiao goes looking for him, visiting various places that Jia covered in his intervening body of work, in particular Still Life. 

The story is about how these two people, whose love affair in Datong is depicted as being tempestuous, drift apart over the years without actually ever forgetting that they were once in love. Jia doesn’t go deep into their lives, something he rarely does with his characters anyway, but he gets more momentum out of his peculiar retread methodology than you might expect. When Qiaoqiao arrives in Fengjie, a city undergoing huge changes in 2006 due to the construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam, she uses the local authorities to track down Bin as a “missing person,” a gambit he doesn’t appreciate because he’s working semi-legally as a demolition project manager for a developer who has to leave town because she’s embezzled her investors’ money. Jia doesn’t make much of this intrigue, but nevertheless uses it effectively to show how Qiaoqiao’s mission to reconnect is a nuisance for Bin under present circumstances. But given the makeshift mechanism of the plotting, the device also tells us more than we need to know about Bin without revealing much about Qiaoqiao, who is definitely the more interesting character.

The film’s structure is necessarily loose and free-form, moving from documentary realism to semi-staged dramatic tableaux and impromptu musical numbers. The music, in fact, whether incidental or central to the action, is impressively utilized, adding a more complete sense of time passing as the movie updates to 2022 by the end. But while I’ve seen it twice now and think Jia succeeded admirably in what he set out to do, Caught by the Tides didn’t move me as much as some of his previous films have, probably because the ongoing narrative lacks an organic consistency that’s necessary to pull the viewer into its world. In the end, when Bin returns to Datong because he’s run out of hustles and disabled by a stroke, it feels anticlimactic, even after he reconnects with Qiaoqiao, who seems to prefer jogging to catching up with an old lover. Naturalism was never so matter-of-fact. 

In Mandarin. Opens May 9 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Caught by the Tides home page in Japanese

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