Movies traditionally present footage that, until recently, had not yet existed in the world. With an exception in its 2022-set final act, Caught by the Tides, a new bit of collagework from Jia Zhangke, repurposes scraps from some of the filmmaker’s previous movies — Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006), and Ash is Purest White (2018), in addition to unreleased documentary footage taken in Datong City near the turn of the millennium— to not just capture a generations-spanning romance, but also survey the transformation of China over the last couple decades and how Jia’s oeuvre has been both informed by and inextricable from it.
Its leads are on-and-off-again lovers Bin and Qiao Qiao (Li Zhubin and Zhao Tao), whom we meet in 2001 and will continue following through the years. There will be a 2006 episode using the looming mass displacement of the Three Gorges Dam project as a backdrop; there’s an early COVID-set coda where Bin searches tirelessly for jobs and a visibly depressed Qiao pays the bills by working at a supermarket where robots greet you at the door with a disconcerting frozen-in-place grin, their tech unsettlingly able to take stock of if you enter looking unhappy.
Caught by the Tides’ focal duo have a ghostly quality. Bin and especially Qiao Qiao, who floats through the film without ever uttering a word, are like specters drifting through an ever-transforming landscape. They have to cyclically find their footing, their energy to keep moving forward diminishing daily. Yet if one is to get emotional watching Caught by the Tides, it might not arise from anything the phantasmal characters do but what we know of its off-camera relationships. Li and Zhao have worked with Jia for decades; his movies have as much obliquely charted the country’s recent history as documented how his trusted collaborators have changed and aged. Bin and Qiao Qiao’s love story may never feel particularly urgent, but the love story between Jia and Zhao — who married in 2012 after a romance sparked around the making of 2000’s Platform — feels present in every frame. The movie functions as a tribute to its pair of lead actors, and also as a reminder that all bodies of work, regardless of explicit narrative interconnectedness, tell a tale about the people responsible for them.
Caught by the Tides’ retrospective aims would befit a filmmaker at the end of his career reminiscing about what used to be. But Jia, who turns 55 in a few weeks, has noted that the film was provoked not by mortality-minded reexamination but COVID-era filmmaking restrictions, the inability to freely shoot a movie impelling him to finally do something with the never-released documentary footage with which Caught by the Tides sometimes interrupts its fictional scenes and sequences. Movies and TV, predominantly escapism-minded, have mostly avoided directly referencing the pandemic. But in a way that reminds me of Miguel Gomes’ recent Grand Tour, which made innovative use of COVID-related restrictions, Caught by the Tides’ conspicuous technical limitations become a boon, something worth artistically colluding with rather than waiting out.
Josh Hartnett in Fight or Flight. Screenshot from YouTube.
Fight or Flight is delectable B-movie fun helped by how enjoyable it is to look at its lead, Josh Hartnett, and the tweaks made to his eternally heartthrob-pretty good looks. His trademark straighter-than-straight brown hair has been box-dyed blonde, and for nearly the whole movie he lumbers around in a dark-blue pajama set whose slight too-smallness is surprisingly sexy. (Before that he wears a Hello Kitty-pink T-shirt stamped with a cartoon of an anthropomorphic strawberry-milk carton.)
The cheap yellow of Hartnett’s choppy ’do might attract your attention, but presumably it’s meant to disguise. His character, Lucas, is a disgraced former Secret Service agent who’s been in hiding for the last two-ish years and has had to perpetually fend off people wanting him gone ever since his scandalous dismissal. In Fight or Flight, he’s given a chance at redemption by an ex, Katherine (Katee Sackhoff), who now leads a shadowy governmental operation. If he can wrangle midair a hard-to-catch hacker who simply calls themselves The Ghost who’s on board an LA-bound flight, his name will be cleared. There are inevitably a few complications: Katherine’s enterprise might not be so upstanding, and The Ghost’s intentions might actually be for the greater good. But Fight or Flight’s real kicker is that most of the plane’s passengers have Lucas’ exact same mission and have, at baseline, a commensurate capacity for ruthlessness to complete it.
Fight or Flight, a Snakes on a Plane (2006)-simple thriller that also wants to be a comedy, can skew obvious when trying to embody the latter. You can feel it taking cues from the try-hard, tweenage boy-baiting edge of the Kingsman movies, from some of its soundtrack’s on-the-nose cuts to some grating characterizations: a nice-cheekboned rival killer who wants to be an entertainer so preoccupied with his classically handsome face that he’ll admire his reflection mid-fight, another who’s a clarinetist who gets out a few notes before revealing the blade hidden within. But unlike that series, it doesn’t overdo it to the point of insufferability. The film is generally breezy, especially compared to the exhausting glibness of 2022’s Bullet Train, which Fight or Flight is clearly inspired by, and the fight choreography is cannily cut and makes inventive use of a commercial airplane’s cramped — and naturally not very receptive to stray bullets — space. You almost don’t question it when chainsaws and pickaxes crop up as weapons of choice.
Hartnett is physically right for this role that demands a slightly worn athleticism and various shades of bewilderment and exhausted determination well communicated by his vulpine eyes. He has a winning, avuncular rapport with Charithra Chandran, who plays an ultra-competent flight attendant who never, despite how their dynamic evolves, is knocked down into damsel-in-distress-style weakness. The pair elevates a straightforwardly premised, made-on-the-cheap thriller into something entertaining enough to whet an appetite for more pleasantly forgettable Saturday-matinee movies like it as the summer progresses.
Featured image credit: Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides. Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films.
Peterson Reviews 