The New Yorker:

More than two decades in the making, Jia Zhangke’s mostly archival film embodies the sweeping transformations of modern China in its very construction.

By Justin Chang

Early on in Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides,” a woman in her twenties, Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao), tries to escape her boyfriend, Guo Bin (Li Zhubin). Lord, how she tries. It’s 2001, and the two are alone on a bus, parked somewhere in Datong, a coal-mining city in northern China. Whenever Qiaoqiao tries to get up and bolt for the exit, Bin hurls her back down into her seat—up and down, up and down, eleven times in a row, until Qiaoqiao, in tears, finally breaks free on the twelfth attempt. You may wonder how the director and actors choreographed this wordless clash of wills: How many throwdowns would suffice? Did Jia, a master of on-the-fly realism, instruct Zhao and Li to improvise—to run through the action again and again, in take after exhausted take, until they were finally ready to get off that bus?

In any event, Jia’s longtime admirers will recognize that this oddly repetitive scene is itself a repetition. The footage first appeared in his film “Unknown Pleasures” (2002), a jaundiced snapshot of aimless Datong youth; Zhao played a dancer and Li a loan shark. In “Caught by the Tides,” the particulars of the grubby racket that Li’s character is running are a little sketchier than before, though not by much. Jia is a spinner of drifty, desultory narratives, with a loose style to match. His dramas, rarely built on tightly interlocking shards of plot, are instead propelled by ambient forces: blasts of music, gusts of chatter. Sometimes they’re carried along on glum motorcycle rides, meandering downriver journeys, and great leaps forward in time. Jia, a social panoramist, also likes to tug your attention sideways, away from the fictional foreground and toward the nonfictional background; there, he suggests, the real story often lies.

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