Caught by the Tides

Zhao Tao       

Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides is film that spans two decades in the Northern Chinese city of Datong. Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse, plays the part of Qiao Qiao who we meet juggling multiple jobs (singer, dancer, model, and bar girl) amidst the gig economy of the year 2000. She has a boyfriend, Bin (Li Zhubin), but he is her manager and the relationship dynamics between them resemble that of whore and pimp. They part when Bin's shady dealings catch up with him. They reunite in 2022 in a China recovering from the COVID pandemic. Bin spies that it is Qiao Qiao checking out his grocery items, but their reunion proves more bitter than sweet. Qiao Qiao has moved on emotionally and the finale has her doing literally just that.

Despite the curdled romance at the film's center, Caught by the Tides is more a meditation on progress, for good and bad, in 21st century China than a fictive narrative. Jia was able to assemble the film, in which his characters really do age, from documentary footage, abortive films, and outtakes from other projects. The film feels haphazard, it leaps about through time and space shifting from grainy video in the Academy ratio to gorgeous widescreen film. Cuts are predicated on poetic links rather than plot development. The use of different modes of travel in the film, air, rail, boat, and road, denote this as a film about life's passage. The soundtrack ranges from Shanxi opera to Chinese punk rock: the only constant is change. We visit an area not basking in the lap of China's economic miracle. Rather, it is an area and culture that has been subsumed since the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam. One of the best films released in the US in 2025 containing a performance for the ages by Zhao Tao.

Envy

Ben Stiller

I was not even aware that Barry Levinson's Envy existed until I stumbled upon a DVD of the film at my local library. Apparently, this 2004 film was such an ignominious flop that it left not a trace on the public consciousness. The two major film companies responsible for its financing had so little faith in it after its box office demise that it never had a release on disc until Shout Factory, champions of pop culture errata, snapped it up. I decided to give it a chance based on the cast alone: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. Alas, the film is direly unfunny. Stiller and Black play SoCal neighbors who work at unfulfilling jobs at a 3M plant. Weisz and Poehler are underutilized as "the wives". Black invents an aerosol spray that eliminates animal waste dubbed Vapoorize. That is the level of the humor. The film's primary focus is on Stiller's resentment over his friend's success. 

There are moments of humor, but they are few and far between. Walken fares best because he is well cast as an eccentric barfly. Black is underused. The only moment that captures his comic energy is an infomercial in which he pitches his product. Stiller is really the lead here. Leon Redbone contributes a song cycle reminiscent of Jonathan Richman's efforts in There's Something About Mary, but comic lightning did not strike twice. Stiller has a good moment telling off his boss, but pratfalls and physical schtick, which the Farrelly brothers handled well in ...Mary, are not Barry Levinson's forte. He is more adept at verbal comedy linked to characterization and characterization is extremely thin in Envy. Stiller and Levinson's attempts to milk physical comedy from a dead horse flop badly. It seems to me when Levinson ventures outside his native Baltimore, the results have been feeble. Avoid Envy.

A Woman of the World

                       Pola Negri and Chester Conklin                    

Malcolm St. Clair's A Woman of the World, released in 1925, is an amusing fish out of water trifle than runs only 70 minutes. The Tubi stream is only so-so in terms of visual fidelity and sharpness, a pity since Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) manned the camera, but it still gives us a chance to see a relatively neglected silent. The film was based on Carl Van Vechten's recent novel, The Tattooed Countess. Tasked with turning this into a vehicle for one of Paramount's big stars, Pola Negri, screenwriter Pierre Collings dropped the age of the Countess by two decades and, thankfully, retained her tattoo. Morrie Ryskind was responsible for the intertitles which sardonically lampoons the narrow mindedness of the Babbitts and Babettes of small town America.

The film opens with a prologue on the Riviera in which Negri finds her husband, a no account count, in flagrante delicto. To get away from her troubles, Pola travels to America to visit his long lost cousin, who turns out to be...Chester Conklin(?!). Conklin, five years removed from Mack Sennett, was still the best second banana in the business and his rapport with Negri is priceless. His character, like all of the men in the film's fictional town of Maple Valley, is suspicious of her foreign ways, but becomes a puddle in her presence. The scene in which he reveals his own tattoo to Negri is priceless. The exoticism of Negri unleashes neurotic and erotic currents in Maple Valley. Two men fall in love with her, the most significant being the local DA (Holmes Herbert), a bluenose with a fanatical zeal for reform. They meet cute when he calls her a loose woman, she is smoking a cigarette after all, and he tells her to leave town. The road to true love is rocky and not helped by the local gossip mongers busy knitting on their porches. Pola ends up confronting the DA at a city council meeting brandishing a whip for a finale that inevitably leads to a clinch and a just married sign. 

Pola Negri: bangs were big in the flapper era

Malcolm St. Clair's career, like Ms. Negri's, nosedived in the sound era. His direction here is simple and elegant, his focus more on actorly byplay than panoramas. He rarely moves his camera and seems fond of close-ups of telling details: hands and balls of yarn. The one pan in the film tracks a bit of gossip as it goes from one end of the room to the other. Negri is playful and game. She suggests a real woman behind the guise of a vamp. I never have cared for Holmes Herbert, too much of a throwback to the 19th century for me, but he fits his uptight role. Charles Emmett Mack plays a younger admirer, the kind leading ladies of the day ultimately reject because they are only a boy. He is promising, but died, prematurely and tragically in an auto accident in 1927. All in all though, A Woman of the World is a delight.