What To Watch: "Caught By The Tides" (plus: Japanese Cinema 101)

Heads up: The next installment of Ty's Movie Club will be next Thursday, August 14th, at 6:30 p.m. at the West Newton Cinema in Newton, MA. This month's film is Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" (1993, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), a movie near and dear to my heart since I graduated high school in 1976, the year the movie takes place, and can relate to everything except the paddles. Come for the film, stay for the discussion, and be prepared to divulge which "Dazed and Confused" character you were in high school. (I know, I know, you were Slater.)

Also: If you're wanting to see something in theaters this weekend and have nerves of steel, I can recommend "Weapons" (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2), a brilliantly scary/funny second film from Zach Cregger ("Barbarian") that, among other things, answers the question "What has Amy Madigan been up to lately?" in ways you are definitely not expecting. My review is up at the Washington Post, and I'll be posting it for paid subscribers later in the day.

I’m torn between thinking that “Caught by the Tides” (2024, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on The Criterion Channel, for rent on Amazon and Apple TV) is the best place to start for a newcomer to the films of Jia Zhangke or the worst. The best because it serves as a summary of this director's themes and, in quite literal ways, to his movies; the worst because sometimes you’re more ill-served by a summary than the things it summarizes. Which is to say that the films made by this ambitious, ambiguous poet of Chinese displacement and social decay are worth encountering on their own, from early works like “Platform” (2000, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) and “Unknown Pleasures” (2002, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) to such recent masterpieces as the past/present/future-tense “Mountains May Depart” (2015, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) and the neorealist gangster romance “Ash is Purest White” (2018, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2).

The concept behind “Caught by the Tides” – it’s too vast to call it a gimmick – is that the movie has been made from footage Jia shot between 2001 and 2023, 22 years of digital film with many of the same actors. Some of the scenes are outtakes from his earlier features, some are scenes from his earlier features repurposed with new meaning, and some consist of documentary and other video footage the filmmaker has tirelessly shot over the years. The only constants are the director’s life partner, muse and longtime leading lady Zhao Tao as Qiao Qiao, a working-class woman left in the lurch by her shady boyfriend, and Li Zhubin as Bin, said boyfriend. We see them age over the years as, behind and around them, modern China slowly morphs into a soulless industrial juggernaut.

So it’s kind of like Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” with an entire country instead of a little kid.

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