Change is a truly difficult thing to capture in scope and scale. Sometimes we see signs and patterns, or indicators of how the world is transforming around us. And the best we can do in those moments where we cannot capture the entire picture is respond through adaptation. Yet these acts of adaptation are easier said than done. Depending on the options and resources before you, life itself often ends up making those choices for you.
Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides is a staggering cinematic achievement, a piece of art deeply engaged with the idea of how one’s perception of change is shaped so starkly by time. Filmed over the course of twenty-two years, the film methodically and confidently charts its pathway through those decades without ever using that duration as a gimmick. Jia and Wan Jiahuan deliver a script that has the utmost confidence in the audience’s ability to follow just how much is changing in between the years, from the beginning of the twenty-first century, to China’s winning bid for what ultimately became the Beijing Olympics, to today.
Part of what makes Caught by the Tides, even in its sequences of languid pacing, so remarkably compelling is that faith in the audience. The script can sense when an audience would ask. “What happened from the last time we saw her?” With remarkable astuteness, it simply presents where its characters are next. Where they go from one year to five years later is more relevant to the story being told than how they got there – we as the audience can simply fill in the gap if they feel the need to do so. I felt that need, from time to time, especially in the more glacial pacing in the film’s first half. But as the film goes on and starts paying off that patience in spades, I felt that need diminishing because I could see and feel what the story was really trying to say.
The lead performance from Zhao Tao as Qiao Qiao particularly allows the intelligence of the script to shine through. It’s an astounding, truly astounding, performance that captures the odyssey of one woman’s life over the course of twenty-two years with little dialogue. The weight of her history, the search of her present, and the slow transformation of her comprehension of what her future holds, is all there in her expressions and body language. That we see her as she was in real life over twenty years ago to how she is presenting the film in 2024 only adds to the impeccable artistry of her performance. Her one line-reading in particular made me deeply, deeply emotional and that she was able to elicit that from me through one syllable is remarkable.
Equally compelling is the performance from Li Zhubin as Bin, Qiao’s manager and abusive partner. He represents a sort of wanton confidence that you would expect from a salesman who has yet to encounter the humility of what failure can bring, of a realization that society is moving past the need for men like him to be at the helm of progress. His depiction of Bin’s change is crucial to the emotional triumph of the film’s climax, which successfully captures the larger conversation about the change in China’s national landscape by zooming in on two people and examining how they’ve changed in relation to one another.
The word “masterpiece” is often overused, especially in the context of the film festival space. But it would be amiss for that word to not be used in the context of such a cinematic achievement. The cinematography, the scripting, the performances—everything moves with a confidence and flow that only a filmmaker as experienced as Jia can achieve. To strike the balance of the grandiose and the personal is an intensely difficult and complicated prospect, but the film accomplishes that feat with an incredible flair—through the deceptive simplicity of a final breath of air, an exultation, into the winter air crackling with heat.
