If you know nothing about Chinese writer-director Jia Zhangke—if this, just maybe, is the first film review you’ve read about the man’s work—know this: He is, in addition to a foundational voice in digital filmmaking and an essential chronicler of China’s transformational 21st century, one of cinema’s truly great Wife Guys. 

Think Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, or John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands. There are more contemporary examples, like Paul W.S. Anderson framing Milla Jovovich’s slo-mo gun-massacres with the devotion of a pilgrim at the base of a holy shrine, or that of Korea’s prolific Hong Sang-soo, who’s now on his 13th or 14th mostly-improvised microbudget gem with Kim Min-hee. Wife Guys are men whose frequent and primary creative accomplice is also their long-term partner, bros whose filmographies have been largely shaped by their life’s loves. Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Rob Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie. Quentin Tarantino and women’s feet.

A power couple less popularly recognized by Western audiences, Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao married in 2012, after they’d made five features together. Their latest and 12th collaboration (counting three shorts), Caught by the Tides is as much a culmination of their past 22 years as it is a pretty impressive retconning of the director’s whole body of work. 

In other words, if you know nothing about Jia, Caught by the Tides might represent a good moment to safely step into his oeuvre’s slipstream.

Using footage drawn from over two decades—captured by the director in Datong, a factory city in Shanxi province around where Jia grew up, and Fengjie, a county on the Yangtze River about 60 miles upstream from the Three Gorges Dam—Jia recasts his filmography as one decades-spanning saga. He’s not so much rewriting the history behind his films as revealing deeper truths hidden beneath its big elemental sweep.

In Caught by the Tides, Zhao Tao plays Qiaoqiao, a woman who may be the same Qiao in Jia’s 2002 film Unknown Pleasures, as well as the same Qiao from Jia’s epic crime banger Ash Is Purest White (2018). All Qiaos are embodied by Zhao like transparent layers, Qiaos stacked on Qiaos like the latest Qiaoqiao’s name. 

And as was the case for past Qiaos, Qiaoqiao is a dancer, model, and ersatz gangster’s moll who’s fully dependent on her low-level hustler boyfriend, Brother Bin (Li Zhubin). That is, until he decides to leave for more lucrative pastures, wherever they may be, cutting off contact completely. With no real prospects in Datong beyond sex work, Qiaoqiao sets out to look for Bin—a journey that seems to last lifetimes, carrying us into the pandemic.

Qiaoqiao, a mute wanderer, wordlessly surveys a post-Mao China as it falls apart and pulls itself back together again. Though keeping Qiaoqiao dialogue-less is likely the easiest way for Jia to assemble so many disparately filmed scenes and images into a coherent narrative, Zhao’s refusal to add more noise to the cacophony of post-industrial life pits her like a small, innocent soul against the scale of such massive change in her country. 

Zhao Tao (left) and Li Zhubin (right) looking cool on a bus. Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films

Qiaoqiao, and therefore Zhao, endure. Searching for her lost lover, she travels down the Yangtze River toward Fengjie County. There, she walks around countless construction crews creating active ruins of neighborhoods and commercial districts that, by 2019, would be completely underwater. One of 13 urban centers evacuated—displacing approximately 1.3 million people—Fengjie was sacrificed to the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world and an incomprehensibly huge infrastructure project. 

Cornered by the constant din of demolition, Qiaoqiao is also, Caught by the Tides implies, of the “Birth Control Generation,” those born during China’s one-child policy. Coming of age when Western culture had proliferated China’s late ’80s and ’90s, raised on a steady diet of TV screens and pop music, she soundlessly bears witness to a country’s epochal evolution. She threads through braying crowds celebrating Beijing winning the bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. 

In addition to recontextualizing raw documentary footage shot as far back as 2001, Caught by the Tides culls alternative or unused takes from the aforementioned Unknown Pleasures and Ash Is Purest White—as well as from Still Life (2006)—swooning anachronistically between ambient, ancient digital video in a 4:3 aspect ratio and stark, full-screen HD. 

A shot of Qiaoqiao in Caught by the Tides is identical to a shot from Unknown Pleasures, but the former is now in sparkling 1080p while the latter was composed of Jia’s handheld DV footage from the 2002 film, a fuzzy relic from an obsolete tool. Did Jia miraculously restore and subsequently upscale this old footage, or did he meticulously restage it in 2022 with a star and technology now two decades older? 

The answer grows increasingly unclear as the film progresses, partly because Zhao has such luminous skin that she both noticeably ages throughout the film and appears frozen outside of time. So much of Caught by Tides’ final third—in which Qiaoqiao and Bin reunite in mid-COVID Shanxi—dwells on close-ups of faces camera technology was once too young to fully observe. 

Zhao Tao with robot. Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films

But Jia doesn’t appear to be interested in mounting a Boyhood-like spectacle of time’s passage. It’s obvious that Zhao’s aged, but what isn’t obvious is how—she seems both pressed on by time and mostly unblemished by its passing. What’s remarkable is how creased her face isn’t by the end. Her presence is undeniably otherworldly, and that’s even before she carries on a heartbreaking conversation with a supermarket robot using only her eyes. It’s believable that she could seamlessly pull off a version of herself 20 years younger. 

What Jia does appear to be interested in is accumulation. Not just of trauma and personal stories and the weight of cyclical forces way outside of our control, but in gathering glimpses of the everyday—people singing, performing, sitting, smoking, waiting, petting dogs, smoking, explaining dubiously ethical arrangements with performers, and smoking as their country wrings itself out—into every frame, while Qiaoqiaio moves in and out of the fringes. 

With Zhao as Jia’s guide-–transcending their Wife Guy trappings—Caught by the Tides becomes a travelogue, a documentary, a crime story, forlorn pandemic fare, and an epic tale that makes the past 25 years feel like a water-logged-woozy dream. For fans of Jia’s work, that emotional build-up could be overwhelming, but even if you know nothing about Jia and Zhao’s partnership, it’s easy to let that dream overtake you. After all, rehashing old intellectual property is all part of the magic of the goddamn movies.


Caught by the Tides opens Friday in Portland at Living Room Theaters.