Caught By the Tides

Official Selection, 2024 Cannes Film Festival

Jia Zhang-ke continues to awe with his latest lyrical masterpiece CAUGHT BY THE TIDES, an epic romance like no other crafted from 23 years of repurposed, unused, and newly shot footage. Stitching together a lifetime of magnificent performances by Zhao Tao, Jia’s recurring character Qiaoqiao searches across decades for a lost lover (Li Zhubin), both caught in the rollercoaster of contemporary China. Jia also blends in documentary footage collected from 20 years of wandering with his camera to find signs of life outside his film shoots – the music, technologies, and everyday people of a nation being simultaneously terraformed by forces such as the pandemic, the Three Gorges dam, and Olympics. Put together, CAUGHT BY THE TIDES is no nostalgic dip into the archive. This is Jia boldly searching for meaning only gleaned by looking back: the currents, tiny and grand, by chance or engineering, that invisibly shape who we are today.

CAUGHT BY THE TIDES is also a triumphant serenade to the many Zhao Tao’s. Jia’s perennial muse and wife enters the frame like a heat-seeking missile and never speaks. She doesn’t need to. Filled with over 19 songs, circle dances, lone serenades, ring tones, karaoke mosh pits, and church songs, CAUGHT BY THE TIDES annotates China’s modern history with extravagant musical abundance and a multitude of voices. But as Tao’s gaze silently clocks China’s changing cultural coordinates, she transforms in parallel before our eyes: from a blade-sharp club kid in 2001 to an aging clerk, softer yet unbroken in 2024.

In one of the film’s many unforgettable scenes, Qiaoqiao and lover face each other, older, sadder, and near the end of their stories. One searched for love, the other for riches, their two different trajectories now written into their bodies’ shape. It’s a devastating moment, one that transitions effortlessly as Qiaoqiao joins a swarm of runners in the night, a wild flourish only possible from one of our era’s greatest observers of humanity and the heart. 

– Christina Ree