Caught By the Tides

Few countries have been transformed as much as China in recent decades, and that change is the backdrop for Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s film contender Caught By the Tides.

Its central story follows a broken relationship, that of Qiao (Zhao Tao), a dancer and promotional model, and music promoter Bin (Li Zhubin), who get together in the northern city of Datong. The relationship is initially passionate but not a happy one, and Bin eventually leaves her to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Qiao tries to contact Bin but he doesn’t reply, so she travels to find him – not so much out of love, but due to her wanting closure. He meanwhile, has got involved with gangsters getting rich off China’s booming economy and corrupt public officials.

Yet the feature is not so much about its central relationship, though it contains musings on the sadness of life, love and our dreams not turning out as one would hope.

Instead, it’s really a cinematic poem about a changing China. Beginning as China became more Westernised at the turn of the Millennium, it uses major moments in that journey as tentpoles. The Three Gorges Dam project, which displaced millions and turned bustling cities into flooded ghost towns, the Beijing Olympics, and at its conclusion, the COVID-19 pandemic. We also get a sense of China’s changing culture through home video style footage, from the smoke-filled rooms and embrace of pop music of the 2000s, to the disconcertingly clean futuristic China of today.

Qiao’s journey to reconnect with Bin also takes her down the Yangtze River, whose vast beauty gives us a sense of China’s scale. The choice to tell the tale with minimal dialogue through its score and the home video-style vignettes provokes the same pangs of nostalgia as when we see the world as once it was through our old videos.

The downside to these choices is that the movie can be hard to follow for non-Chinese audiences, as much of the story is told by Jia Zhangke’s visual language – which will undoubtedly have more power to those with deeper knowledge of the country it depicts.

However, if you let Caught By the Tides wash over you rather than try to understand every detail, it is a genuinely touching, poetic, if melancholic, work of art about loss, change and the making of modern China.

Mark Worgan

Caught By the Tides does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.