Caught by the Tides second look review: Jia Zhangke’s haunting triptych on the spectres of progress

Certain actors hold our attention simply by the way they move through space. Zhao Tao never speaks in Caught by the Tides (2024), the latest film in her longrunning collaboration with her husband, the director Jia Zhangke. Her muteness serves the film in several ways, but one is to make us thrillingly aware of how much she communicates with her movements, her stillness and her gestures. 

We see her first as a young woman in a Cleopatra wig, dancing in crowded clubs, modelling body-hugging sportswear, carrying herself with fierce and haughty grace. When the film picks her up again five years later, she is an almost ghostly figure in beige, drifting through a ruined city, defensively clutching her rucksack in front of her body. After 16 more years, a stillness has settled over her; swaddled in a winter coat, her face mostly hidden by a Covid-era mask, she looks weary and withdrawn. She speaks now through her eyes, so agonisingly expressive of pent-up feeling that you almost hold your breath waiting for it to burst out.

This extraordinary performance is actually a series of performances, collapsing two different fictional characters into one woman, Qiao Qiao. Caught by the Tides is the sublime culmination of a project that has gestated almost a quarter of a century. Since 2001, when Jia began using digital video, he has made a practice of shooting documentary-style footage of actors and settings during the making of his films; his original name for the project was Man with a Digital Camera, in homage to Dziga Vertov. During lockdown, he combed through the footage – around a thousand hours – to construct the first two sections of Caught by the Tides, which repurpose material from Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Still Life (2006). He then shot a final chapter set in the present, which honours the impressionistic, elliptical quality of the earlier sections.

In the resulting film, we see Zhao Tao age in real time, a silent witness to seachanges in China’s cities, landscapes and society. She is always riveting, whether eating a cheap meal, charging her phone in a café, or wandering through a nuclear power plant in the rain. Jia has often been compared to Antonioni, who followed the hypnotic ramblings of Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti through a tetralogy of films, defining the wandering woman as an avatar of alienated modernity. In Jia’s own cycle – including Ash Is Purest White (2018), another time-spanning three-part epic – a stoic, questing Zhao Tao is repeatedly linked with a man, often named Guo Bin (played here by Li Zhubin), who abandons or mistreats her.

Caught by the Tides strips away any plot specifics or explanations, distilling the story down to archetypal motifs of separation, searching, and fleeting reunion. This slender thread is woven into a collage of documentary tableaux and narrative fragments, further stitched together by music: a sonic tapestry of folk and pop songs and electronic dance beats. As the texture of the digital video grows sharper, the shabby, bustling streets of 2001 give way to the sleek, sanitised, and mostly empty public spaces of 2022. The film opens and closes in the bleak, industrial Datong City, but the centrepiece takes place in Fengjie, a town being evacuated and demolished as the waters of the Three Gorges hydroelectric project rise. Qiao Qiao arrives and departs by boat on the swollen Yangtze River, entering a dreamlike, haunted terrain where she searches for the vanished Bin as the city itself disappears. Snapshots and toys are caught like flotsam among the rubble.

The loss and displacement attending the promise of progress could hardly be more potently conveyed, yet Caught by the Tides, with its digressive and observational style, never feels heavy-handed or polemical. There is, however, a deepening ache of loneliness, as the communal body heat of parties and parades in the first section gives way to chilly isolation in the world of screens and Covid protocol. Qiao Qiao seems delighted by the cheerful robot greeter patrolling a supermarket, which reads her face as sad and dispenses wisdom about love and laughter from Mother Theresa and Mark Twain. But in a hushed final scene amid falling snow, her feelings remain tantalisingly unreadable. Qiao Qiao’s silence becomes the film’s refusal of judgement or resolution. All we know, in the end, is that she is still moving.

► Caught by the Tides screens at the ICA London until May 6.