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Review | Cannes 2024: Caught by the Tides movie review – Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke launches another nostalgia-tinged epic
- Mixing digital video footage of his hometown Jia shot in 2001, outtakes from his previous films, and newly shot scenes, Caught by the Tides is a nostalgia trip
- The fictional story, lightly sketched, of a romance between a dancer and a hoodlum is less engaging than scenes of lives uprooted for China’s Three Gorges Dam
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3/5 stars
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Mainland Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s on-screen cameo as a ragged, chain-smoking mobster in Guan Hu’s Black Dog ranks as one the biggest surprises at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
The same cannot be said for his own film screening at Cannes, however.
Charting a couple’s on-off relationship in China across the past two or so decades, Caught by the Tides is very much a replica of the director’s previous feature Ash is the Purest White, which also premiered in competition at Cannes, in 2018. Jia has also reprised the stylistic approach of his 2015 film Mountains May Depart.
Caught by the Tides comprises a crisply edited combination of Jia’s own digital videos of his hometown, outtakes from his previous films (specifically Still Life from 2006) and newly minted footage by Yu Lik-wai.
The film is at its most captivating and moving early on, when it is based largely around Jia’s own footage from 2001 in Datong, when the city was contending with deindustrialisation and the privatisation of state assets.
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