In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as a singer and model while juggling the attentions of her abusive agent Qiao San (played by Li Zhubin), her young boyfriend Xiao Ji, and Xiao’s friend Guo Bin. The film is set in the northern Chinese city of Datong, about five hours north of Jia’s hometown, Fenyang.
In 2006, Jia Zhangke made Still Life, shot in the last days of the dismantling of the city of Fengjie, soon to be flooded as a result of the Three Gorges Dam project. Zhao Tao plays Shen Hong, a nurse searching the town for her estranged husband, Guo Bin (played by Li Zhubin). She eventually finds him, but it seems he’s been up to no good: shady real estate dealings, sending gangs of kids to fight other gangs, romancing a corrupt politician — so she ditches him.
In 2018, Jia Zhangke made Ash is Purest White, which is set over three time periods. It begins with footage leftover from Unknown Pleasures, but quickly moves to new material and introduces Zhao Tao as a woman named Zhao Qiao who, along with her husband Guo Bin (played by Liao Fan), are medium-level gangsters in the city of Datong. In its second third, the film shifts to Fengjie, where Jia mixes in leftover footage from Still Life. Zhao is in town again searching for Guo Bin, who has been engaged in shady business dealings. They meet and break up. In the final third, Guo returns to Datong after suffering a stroke, where Zhao wearily takes care of him.
In 2024, Jia Zhangke has made Caught by the Tides, which is set over three time periods. It begins with footage from Unknown Pleasures, some of it outtakes, some of it repeated from the earlier film. Zhao Tao plays Qiao Qiao, an aspiring actress and model who is in a relationship with her agent. He’s again played by Li Zhubin, but he’s now named Guo Bin. After a fight, Guo texts her that he’s off to make his fortune and disappears. In its second third, the film shifts to Fengjie, where Jia mixes in leftover footage from Still Life. Zhao is in town searching for Guo Bin, who has been engaged in shady business dealings, including sending gangs of kids to fight other gangs and dating a corrupt politician, so she ditches him. In its final third, Guo returns to Datong after suffering a stroke, where he and Qiao reunite.
What are we to make of these rhymes and repetitions? Why is it that in Jia Zhangke’s films, we are presented with an infinite variety of Zhao Taos, but those Zhaos are perennially stuck with losers named Guo Bin who don’t deserve her? Actually, that’s not much of a question: the fact that Zhao is Jia’s wife should explain it. Caught by the Tides’ remixing of old material can be partially explained by practical reasons: shooting during Covid would limit the scale and time Jia and his crew could devote to a new project. But it’s tough to fully buy into that: plenty of Chinese filmmakers have been able to make wholly new movies over the past four years without scavenging the outtakes of their past work.
Rather, the simpler explanation is that Jia is getting older, and one of the things that happens when you get old is that you spend a lot more time thinking about your past than you do going out there to create new memories. He made Unknown Pleasures as his third feature film, when he was 31 years old. It’s not unexpected that he would constantly think about other ways he could have made it, other directions its story could have gone. It was a film that consciously set out to capture a new generation of Chinese youth, kids who had grown up completely in the post-Cultural Revolution era, when China was rapidly modernizing and, to some extent, Westernizing. In 2006, with Still Life, Jia found the perfect symbolic representation of the effects of that modernization in the crumbling city of Fengjie.
Ever since Jia returned to fiction filmmaking after a seven-year absence (during which time he made a handful of documentaries), his films have been episodic attempts to capture a wide swath of modern China. A Touch of Sin combined real-life news reports of scattered tragedies with the conventions of wuxia and other genre fiction in an attempt to link China’s seemingly alienated present to its long and complex history. The three films after that are split into thirds, spanning from 2001 to the mid-2000s to the present to the near future. Mountains May Depart created new stories and characters for each of its timelines, while Ash and Tides reconfigure Jia’s previous work. Where Sin took wuxia as its referent, Ash used Heroic Bloodshed cinema, tracking the difference between gangsters who followed the form of the Chow Yun-fat heroes they idolized and those who truly upheld the honorable ideas the films espoused. Tides, though, is nothing more or less than a romance: a missed chance followed by grave mistakes, with the hope of reconciliation and atonement to come with the wisdom of age.
Mountains was widely criticized (mostly unfairly, in this writer’s opinion) for its depiction of the next generation in the form of Zhao Tao’s character’s son. It seems likely that Jia, realizing he is no longer connected to the youth of China, has retreated to the safety of his middle-aged memories, content to refashion his past and mine it for new potential resonances, rather than attempt to capture a younger generation he really doesn’t understand anymore. This may explain why, given that in the middle third of Tides, set in 2006, Guo Bin is said to be 32 years old, but in the section set in 2022, he appears much older than 48. I’m 48, and while I don’t look that old either, believe me, I feel like it every time I try to figure out what these kids today are up to and why.
Tides feels like an attempt at summarization, a way to close the book on a chapter of Jia’s filmmaking before (hopefully) moving on to new and original products. The movie it reminds most of (aside from Jia’s own films, of course) is Adam Curtis’ It Felt Like a Kiss, which similarly reconfigured the director’s last decade or so of work, but distilled down to its essence. Just as Tides is shorn of most conventional dialogue or characterization, Kiss does away with Curtis’ famous narration: both movies instead make extensive use of title cards to explain necessary information, but otherwise rely on music and images to convey their stories.
Mountains begins and ends with the sound of waves crashing, the opening sounds of the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of “Go West” and also possibly a reference to Zhao Tao’s given name, which means “waves”. Tides begins and ends with the sound of wind blowing. Both the wind and the waves are expressions of motion, ironic for a filmmaker who seems stuck in his moment. Ash is Purest White gets its title metaphor from a volcano, the heat of the earth purifying its heroine’s soul. Looking to the future, Jia has given us UFOs and transparent iPads and talking robots. Will he find new elements for his movies as well?
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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