The hopelessness and disillusionment with regard to what a communist state had promised to be and what it has actually turned into where communism still exists (in whatever form) have often found their way into many films in the modern era. It is easy to identify the same ideas in the new film of Chinese filmmaking master Jia Zhangke, although very subtly and indirectly, for Caught by the Tides is much more than just social or political commentary. The film has a very loose plot about a woman’s somewhat unrequited love that spans decades but does not ultimately have any triumph. But Caught by the Tides is mostly a slow and patient observation of the changing times, the literal geographical changes, and of course the many social transformations that come with them. Zhangke’s new film makes for a delightful and thoroughly moving watch, and is highly recommended for fans of serious global cinema.
Spoiler Alert
Is It a documentary or a fiction film?
Caught by the Tides is a unique and beautiful coming together of the two most distinct forms of cinema—a documentary and a fiction film—that has been possible only because of the highly unusual way that it was shot. Released in 2024 in the international film festival circuit, Zhangke actually started shooting it way back, in 2002, with a very faint script, or idea, in mind. In 2002, he was shooting for Unknown Pleasures in the city of Datong, and having recently made the shift to the much cheaper and more versatile digital format, he kept taking shots of the city and its people. He often took videos of the lead actress from the film, Zhao Tao, at various singing parties and clubs, perhaps with the wish to make a film, or rather, a retrospective, out of this footage.
Then in 2006, Zhangke shot at the small town of Fengjie, on the bank of the Yangtze River, for his masterpiece, Still Life, which won him the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. As he had continued shooting for his dream project all this while, similar footage was taken at Fengjie as well. Both Unknown Pleasures and Still Life starred Zhao Tao and actor Li Zhubin, and so they were often shot by Zhangke for this personal project as well. In 2018, he returned to Datong for Ash is Purest White, and he continued shooting Tao, imagining her in a story that existed in his mind but not in its complete form. It then took him a few more years and for the world to come to a complete standstill during the COVID-19 pandemic to give his initial idea of a personal film fruition.
Caught by the Tides is indeed this personal film that Zhangke had started shooting, perhaps to make a retrospective, but it ended up as a feature-length film of unique style. Because of the way in which it had been shot, the film has a very evident documentary-like appearance, because it shows real places and real people without any script keeping the camera bound to anything specific. There are many scenes where the central characters are simply not present for long stretches, and it comes off as a documentary about the evolving communist government. Most importantly, the film being shot over two decades means that it also very inherently becomes a witness to the almost unbelievable transformation China has undergone as a country in this time.
Despite these objective truths, if we may call them so, the film is still a scripted feature-length fiction as well, and Zhangke has managed to do this by putting together the scenes he had shot with Tao and Zhubin in the past. There are a few scenes that have been shot in 2022 as well, during the strict lockdowns imposed due to COVID-19, where the whole tale has been rounded up. In this sense, Caught by the Tides is a unique and unexpected blend of fact and fiction and is best treated as a fiction feature made with a very real and documentary-like backdrop.
Does The Film have any conventional story?
Caught by the Tides does have a story, revolving around the protagonist, Qiao Qiao, although it is not as tight, or central, as plots usually are in narrative media. Qiao Qiao is a regular woman from the mining city of Datong, trying to make her ends meet by working as a singer and a model. She has ambitions of perhaps travelling to a bigger city, in search of a better life, someday, and so she starts working as a club girl at the newly reopened Workers’ Cultural Palace in the city. Her life is full of the usual troubles that a woman working in such a profession has to face, as she is often cornered and stalked by men who have all the wrong intentions, but Qiao Qiao is brave enough to survive by herself.
While working as a club girl, she meets with a local gangster named Guao Bin and falls in love with him. Although this romantic relationship is not exactly normal, as Bin clearly exerts a lot of power and influence over Qiao Qiao and seemingly goes around with other women as well, she is quite serious about it and is admittedly very invested in it. Therefore, when Bin suddenly texts her that he is leaving Datong in search of better work outside, Qiao Qiao is somewhat angry at what she considers to be a betrayal, while being mostly sad that she will have to part ways with her beloved.
A few years later, Qiao Qiao can no longer believe in Bin’s claim that he will come to get her as soon as he secures a good job, and so she eventually decides to travel in search of him herself. As she sails down the Yangtze, from the northern part of the country, she reaches Fengjie City in 2006, around the same time that the Three Gorges Dam is being built on the river. She continues to work as a singer and model to earn her livelihood during the long search, and even gets in trouble at times, with local goons and fraudsters trying to loot her. But with the passage of time, Qiao Qiao seems to have grown smarter and more ruthless, now carrying a high-voltage taser with her instead of just trying to avoid her harassers like she used to earlier.
Meanwhile, Guao Bin gets caught up in a political scandal while working with another goon named Pan, who puts him through with a local politician, Ding. Turns out, Ding has been siphoning public funds into her own account, and when the right time comes, she flees the city, and possibly even the country, with all this money. Bin helps her escape and essentially takes the fall for her as well while he is investigated by the police. Around this time, Qiao Qiao grows frustrated with her futile search, and so she goes to a local news channel to have a public announcement made for Bin, along with an old photo of the estranged couple. Her plan works, and Bin comes looking for her, although only to see if anything is wrong and not really to reunite with her.
Surprisingly, it is Qiao Qiao who refuses to be with Bin anymore, as she comes to terms with the reality of their lopsided relationship and also makes it clear that she had only been looking for a sense of closure all this while. She returns to Datong, and decades pass, with her and Bin no longer being in touch. Finally, in 2022, a much older Bin flies to Zhuhai City in Southern China, under strict lockdown protocols because of the pandemic. It is here that he once again runs into Qiao Qiao, who now works as a cashier at a local convenience store. The two are surely surprised to see each other once again, after so many years, and in an unprecedented global scenario where the world has stopped operating normally. But their story does not have a happy ending, as Qiao Qiao once again decides to step away and keep living by herself, as she now knows all too well that she does not need anyone else in life, unlike what she had believed so many years ago.
What Is The Three Gorges Dam, and how is it significant to the film?
The Three Gorges Dam, or officially, the Yangtze River Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project, is actually a gigantic hydroelectric gravity dam on the Yangtze, which has been the main lifeline to China for centuries. The Three Gorges Dam had been built with the intention of using the Yangtze’s tidal force to generate electricity, and it is still the world’s largest power station in terms of the amount of electricity that it produces each year. But the construction of the dam has a bleak history of its own, which finds a mention in Caught by the Tides, and also in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, which was centered around characters affected by the project.
The Chinese government decided, in 2003, to build a mega dam on the Yangtze River, and they allocated 203 billion Chinese yuan for the construction, which was easily the biggest project ever undertaken in the country at the time. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, however, firstly meant that thousands of people living in towns and cities at various spots along the Yangtze had to be displaced, as the land they had been living on was taken away by the state. Moreover, the construction of the dam would also mean that numerous cities and towns similarly located along the Yangtze would get flooded each year due to the rising waters, and so they had to be moved as well.
By 2008, 1.24 million people were officially moved from their homes, essentially displaced, by the government, who did build colonies for their rehabilitation. The events from Fengjie City in Caught by the Tides take place in 2006, when the displacement of the people had been announced and was being carried out at various places along the river, and so the matter naturally finds a place in the film. There is an extended scene in which we see people of all ages, sometimes with their pet animals, travelling on trains, which was actually shot during this enforced relocation process. A few short interviews are presented as well, in which the locals talk about their acceptance of the rehabilitation, only because it is a service for the development of their nation, but their pain and frustration are evident in their eyes.
The residents of Fengjie City had no other option at all than to accept their fate and move out of their homes, as dissenters are not dealt with lightly in the highly controlled social structure of China. Their plight seemingly gives Qiao Qiao a perspective on life, which probably helps her accept her own situation of having been abandoned by Bin, and this is possibly why she ultimately rejects him, both at this time and also later on in 2022. Zhangke has always been interested in this large-scale displacement, and the central characters in “Still Life” are ones terribly afflicted by the construction project.
How does The Film encapsulate China’s growth in the background?
Along with the very direct impact caused by the Three Gorges Dam, the stupendous economic and developmental growth in China also finds its place in the background of Caught by the Tides, arguably being even more significant. The entire film screams the sense of change, and the associated disillusionment, with regard to the shape that the Chinese Communist Party had taken and how society was turning out to be. With the country opening up to liberalization and then becoming a member of the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001, capitalism rushed in with all its social impacts as well. This is probably why there are so many dance clubs in Datong after the turn of the century, and helpless women like Qiao Qiao take up the position to serve the needs of this growing culture.
The Workers’ Cultural Palace is shown to be in a particularly desperate state, rundown and barely standing, as neither the government nor the workers it had been built for are interested in cultural entertainment of the old-fashioned kind. Instead, it is now privately owned by a man who is trying to bring back customers by turning it into a song and dance club. He is proud of the fact that he does not charge any money from the customers but instead takes a small cut out of the fees that the performers earn every session. Both this economic model and the desperation that is bringing women performers in droves are clear indications of the societal changes that are to come in the following decades.
China’s growth is obviously most evident in the section from 2022, and interestingly, Zhangke uses much more modern cameras to shoot this segment, meaning that the cinematic form itself bears testimony to the overall development. Qiao Qiao finds the robots, which are now used to perform many jobs that once required manual labor and which are ridiculously trained to act more human. But this advancement has also inadvertently brought an overarching sense of alienation, which is evident from the very opening of this sequence. While the previous sequences began with groups of women and men either singing or just sitting together, the crowd here is vastly different, with everyone stuck to their phones and with no interaction with one another.
There is also an immense rush to become popular online, which is considered the most lucrative means of earning money in modern times, and thus old men of the community have to learn and practice silly content creation, hoping to become viral. The sense of nationalism that was once so visible through the citizens’ march after Beijing was selected to host the 2008 Olympics still exists, albeit in a different form. Ultimately, Zhangke wants to encapsulate the change in his country and the countrymen, without necessarily taking a specific stance, but like all his other films, Caught by the Tides also indirectly makes us look back at what exactly this development has cost throughout the years.
Do Qiao Qiao and Bin reunite in the end?
Caught by the Tides ends with Qiao Qiao and Bin walking over to an empty street late at night, with there seemingly being a possibility of them reuniting. However, Qiao Qiao actually bids Bin a tearful goodbye, suggesting that her life has changed tremendously as well, perhaps as a direct result of the overall development in their country, because of which she cannot reunite with him anymore. Bin earlier admits that he has moved back to his homeland because he at least has a house here, since his professional endeavors had all failed because of the global lockdown. He will have to return to his house by himself and go on living like he has for all these years.
Meanwhile, Qiao Qiao is seen joining a large group of joggers, who flock the streets of the city at night and are seen taking their masks off as well. It remains unclear to me whether they are normal joggers who come out of their houses each night for routine physical exercise when they are permitted to, or whether they are some sort of community watch or first aid workers who begin their shifts in such a manner. Either way, Qiao Qiao joining them confirms that she is going to continue living by herself, on her own terms, and quite significantly, we hear her shout for the only time in the film. The woman had never talked throughout Caught by the Tides, and her character seemed to be mute, but the ending changes this perception.
Perhaps Qiao Qiao’s shout at the end suggests that she has finally found her voice to turn down a man who she knows is no good for her. In the previous sequence, when she had rejected him in 2006, it was probably more out of a sense of emotional misery, but this time she is more resolute. The shout at the end might also be a final reminder to us that we are watching a work of fiction, after all, and that the actress steps out of the character to assume her own self, especially because of the testing times in which the film was made.
