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‘Caught by the Tides’ Review: Jia Zhangke Weaves a Shimmering New Tapestry from Threads of His Previous Films
Zhao Tao stars in Jia Zhangke's epic, lyrical "Caught by the Tides" as a woman searching for a lost lover in a defining portrait of modern China.
But what that version cannot adequately convey is the airiness and the yearning that Jia whips in to “Caught by the Tides” — quite miraculously considering he is largely working with repurposed footage from across the last 23 years of his justly celebrated career. Jia’s risky experiment is so uncannily successful that it is possible to come away from “Tides” with the whimsical impression that this was the film he was building toward all this time, as though all those lauded previous movies were simply him amassing the raw material for this one. The Jia devotee may wish to parse each scene for its provenance, and in the unfakeably authentic aging process of the actors, or their costumes, or the aspect ratio or stock quality, they will find enough evidence to be able to place much of the film back into its prior context.
Or read this on Variety
