Jia Zhangke's romance is in the mood; The substance is harder to find

Faithful sixth-generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke leads his partner and muse, Zhao Tao, on a decades-long romantic odyssey in Taken by the tideswhich seeks to play too much with time and form for the connection between its tracks to be its central concern.

Measured in silence interspersed with moments of dance and music – both performed and for pleasure – Qiaoqiao (Zhao) begins a relationship with the mysterious young Guo Bin (Li Zhubin) when she spots him on a dance floor. But their happiness is disrupted when Bin becomes frustrated and seeks to escape from his home in Datong, northern China. Qiaoqiao, confused by his sudden disappearance, goes looking for him, but her new life doesn’t seem to have room for her.

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There’s little more to the story than that – some peripheral characters return for a scene or three, hinting at a larger narrative than ever before, but Jia is more interested in playing with form and mood. Qiaoqiao and Bin never exchange dialogue; in fact, Qiaoqiao never speaks. It’s an idea that proves more difficult for the director to maintain than it might first appear. Finally, distant and abstract glances must pave the way for a breaking scene which relies on intertitles to express what is said, going against the desired goal.

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The larger narrative of the film is actually the march of time itself. Its first scenes were filmed in 2001 and it took over 20 years for everything to come to fruition. By the time we return to Datong at the end of the film, the old mining town has become another world of futuristic possibilities. At the beginning of the film, we are told that the Olympic Games will be held in Beijing. In the end, our characters wear masks and queue for PCR tests as the Covid pandemic spreads. During their journey, the constant construction and demolition of an ever-changing country is never far away. China is changing and evolving as Qiaoqiao and Bin make very little progress in understanding themselves – and each other.

The director also takes advantage of the passage of time to return to his own history of cinema. At first, home video and 16mm film intertwine to tell the story; by the end of the film, we are in a digital world, with high-tech cameras performing computer-controlled movements. It’s a lot, and the film is at its best when it gives us a clean, beautifully cinematic setting, something Jia never struggles to do no matter where we are in the timeline. But the notion of evolving technology at least makes for one amusing scene in which Qiaoqiao encounters a robot assistant who greets her at a supermarket.

Zhao can do so much with her eyes — even when she’s wearing an N95 mask that threatens to swallow the rest of her face — that she commands our attention despite her character’s stoicism. Even the robot can detect the sadness on Qiaoqiao’s face at a wasted life. It’s the performance that anchors the film; Jia Zhangke’s informal and experimental approach to construction might be his selling point, but without Zhao, the tides would struggle to catch up.

Title: Caught by the Tides (Feng Liu Yi Dai)
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Jia Zhangke
Cast: Zhao Tao, Zhubin Li
Sales agent: MK2 Movie
Operating time: 1h 51m

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