‘Caught by the Tides’ Review: Jia Zhangke Stands Up for China but Watches Things Fall Apart

Chinese director Jia Zhangke put a note on a title card at the end of his film “Caught by the Tides,” which screened in the Main Competition of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on Saturday: “Just standing up for the land of my birth.” But there’s no just in this film, or for that matter in any of his work. “Caught by the Tides” is an examination of the director’s homeland, to be sure, but it’s far more evasive and challenging than mere tribute.

A portrait of modern China that manages to be both grounded in reality and sparked by illusion, “Caught by the Tides” is also an impressionistic, nonlinear work that mixes fiction and nonfiction; it’s as easy to lose your bearings in Zhangke’s wash of images as it is to get lost Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”