Go with the flow

Movies talk to each other. What did the films of 2025 have to say? This is a look at how three movies from the past year tackle similar subjects in different ways. Be warned, SPOILERS for One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides follow.

“Time just gets away from us,” Mattie Ross says at the end of True Grit. Her story (in Charles Portis’ novel and in the Coens’ adaptation — but not Henry Hathaway’s earlier 1968 film) has leaped forward from the bulk of the narrative, to a time decades into a future where she is no longer young and the world is a different place, where outlaws that imposed their will on the land are tamed and tired. The world moves on and so do the people on it, some on the ground shifting beneath them and some trying to outrun that movement. Where do you wind up? What do you leave behind?

One Battle After Another is very specifically unclear about its timeline. It adapts Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s 1980s-set novel about the aftermath of 1960s revolutionaries, and appears to update the timeline by 40 years or so (actions in what seems like the late 90s-early 00s reverberate in our apparent present day). The mode of 60s radicals feels strange fast forwarded, when much of the audience knows a Weather Underground-style group was not active in this time but the Occupy movement was. But what writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is after is the dislocation of people who believed deeply in something only to see it fail, and that feeling overcomes the weird mix of transposed movements. 

And part of Anderson’s scheme is to tie these political waves to forces that are smaller but perhaps more potent. The French 75 are an activist — a terrorist? — group with liberation on their mind; Teyana Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio are lovers who become parents, people now subject to an 18-year commitment of raising a child. The lengthy opening act of OBAA sets up the later plot, clearly suggesting that oppressor Sean Penn could be the actual father of Taylor and DiCaprio’s child, but it also limns the structures and fissures of a couple that is committed to revolution but unsure about parenthood.

DiCaprio is a man smitten by his child and his lover but Taylor believes in power and potential over all. “My child comes from a whole line of revolutionaries. And you look so lost. She’s a runner. And you a stump,” Taylor’s mother tells DiCaprio. But she doesn’t know that Taylor’s running has led her to Penn. And while Penn has coerced her, Taylor has not been unmoved by Penn’s rigid fury in pursuit of a goal (as opposed to DiCaprio’s unquestioning devotion in pursuit of her). Taylor murders her way out of one tough spot but submits to sex with Penn, and ultimately is so emmeshed she betrays everyone she once stood with. While DiCaprio takes the baby and flees, our beloved revolutionary sweetheart takes the bag – until she abandons Penn as well, going in the wind for the rest of the film.

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Anderson had been working on OBAA since the early 2000s. Jia Zhangke had been filming Caught By The Tides since the early 2000s, although he didn’t know it at the time. The film is largely composed of outtakes from footage Jia filmed for other projects — the features Unknown Pleasures, Still Life and Ash Is Purest White, but documentaries as well — and edited into a loose narrative while still retaining the occasional talking head. While Anderson stages his trip back in time, Jia actually captures a lost era.

Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin are young and careless in the broken-down city of Datong, Zhao is making money as a dancer for events organized around beverage promotion and it’s not entirely clear what Li is up to as her manager and they seem to have plenty of time to waste. But instead of seeking revolutionary escape, Li leaves to find better work elsewhere and promises to send for Zhao later. A few years go by and Zhao comes to the city of Fengjie, which is about to be drowned by the Three Gorges Dam, to find her old beau. 

This section echoes the plot of Still Life (and part of Ash Is Purest White) and if it is familiar, the demolished landscape and people finding ways to exist in it is still unearthly in Jia’s long, quietly prowling shots. The club footage from earlier in the film may have unfamiliar music and people but still hits an amusing nostalgic pang for anyone who can remember their early 20s in the early aughts (it turns out guys the world over have the same terrible dance moves), and Zhao is impossibly cool as she glides through these scenes. But even as she’s embracing the moment she’s in she’s holding something back, and this self-possession drives her almost wordlessly through Fengjie as she searches for Li, stealing what she needs and apologizing for nothing. She only cracks a smile once, as she watches a TV program about a futuristic helpful robot. Li has taken a job working some kind of construction scam with mid-level gangsters and a woman who he clearly has feelings for, but his crimes feel more quotidian than Zhao’s quest. When she finally tracks him down, she realizes that he’s not the person she was seeking, and she is the one who leaves, heading back down the rising Yangtze River to whatever is next.

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OBAA’s time jump is one of weary stagnation. DiCaprio is still alive but burned out, his revolutionary network deep underground and apparently a failure at producing any lasting change. The only thing to show for all that struggle a decade and a half down the line is a nearly grown-up daughter, Chase Infiniti, barely tolerating her dropped-out dad as she prepares for prom. But her existence is a problem for Penn, who can’t have a potentially biracial illegitimate daughter in his background as he prepares to join a white nationalist cabal, and he hunts down the remaining French 75 members in order to snatch up her and her pothead father. The quiet present is ambushed by the past.

But what gives the movie its great charge over the remaining two hours is how DiCaprio’s own past has only been sleeping. He may stumble and argue and freak out and forgot a few codes, but he knows how to move, where to run, how to seize an opportunity to stay upright. In some ways, he’s more successful than his ex-wife in this way. And he’s imparted this attitude to Infiniti, who also stumbles and fucks up and yet keeps her head and listens to (most of) what her dad told her. They find a revolutionary world that has been moving without them, whether through a convent of pot-growing nuns or through Benicio del Toro’s friendly sensei who just happens to be running an underground railroad for undocumented immigrants, calmly overseeing a network that switches focus to getting DiCaprio out of this jam and back with his daughter. If OBAA’s lengthy prologue was about the failure of an attack, the rest of the film is about the energy of resistance. 

Tides first jumps in space, from a riverboat to an airplane, and the viewer’s eye may note the change in filming style (the digital video looks cleaner, more present) before being sucker punched by the passengers, who are all wearing masks. Well, one or two have them around their chins, young people who are the same age Zhao and Li were at the start of the film and full of the same youthful indifference, but everyone else is sealed up tight. Time has not stood still, the pandemic has come out of nowhere, just like it did in real life. But the pandemic’s effects don’t account for the injured leg and hesitant movements of a man who seems diminished even beyond the lines on his forehead conveying the passage of time. This is Li, and he has gotten old.

Li travels south to hit up one of his old gangster buddies for work, the old buddy is in the hospital and can only be visited by video call. Smartphones are everywhere, instead of construction scams the buddy’s nephew is milking the local drunk’s antics for TikTok fodder, making cheesy music videos and getting millions of clicks and then monetizing the attention via paid ad reads. DiCaprio has his own phone troubles in OBAA but they are crossed wire connections, Li watches this new economy like a man seeing footage of another planet. So he goes back to Datong — and while shopping for groceries he meets Zhao, who is a cashier. They are both masked, but he recognizes her eyes. Jia pulled this trick in Ash Is Purest White and it is no less remarkable here — Zhao’s aging onscreen, her face slightly filling out and her body slightly stiffer but so clearly the same person with the same gaze that opens up who she looks at and gives nothing that she does not want to away. OBAA finds tension both comedic and not in how DiCaprio and his dad bod are trying to reclaim his past facilities in a degraded present, but Zhao just carries the past’s weight with her into this brave new world.

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The heroes of OBAA live under cover if not underground, walking around in public but concealing hidden lives. Which the state ruthlessly exposes — Penn’s goons, including actual Department of Homeland Security interrogator James Raterman, unearth DiCaprio’s old crew and force nearly all of them to rat out their old comrade. The protagonists of Tides live in the echoes of loudspeakers announcing state news, with one report late in the film making sure to disparage the U.S.’ pandemic response. A few soldiers are seen running testing facilities but the state is felt as a larger force, the body behind the dam that swallowed a town, as opposed to the conspiratorial secret societies of OBAA that are still largely depicted through individual actors. This winds up giving DiCaprio and Infiniti an edge, as bounty hunters have changes of heart and would-be allies in fascism turn on each other. The tensest part of the movie is not any confrontation between our heroes and their antagonists but after the villains all been vanquished, when a frightened Infiniti is prepared to shoot DiCaprio because he once again can’t remember the right code. But she trusts him and he trusts her, and they reunite with a hug.

Zhao does not immediately respond to Li when they meet again after all this time. She finishes her shift and does her own shopping, meeting one of those friendly robots that buzzes around the grocery store. It tells her she looks sad and gives her inspirational quotes from Mother Teresa and Mark Twain about living with sadness and overcoming it with laughter. Zhao does not look happier after this and why should she? What the fuck does this lifeless heartless thing know about living through heartbreak? She walks into the night to find a rock band playing an open-air show, belting out a song of yearning through the chilly weather, and Li walks up besides her. The song is right, the time is now, and the pair walks away together through the streets of Datong, down a road Jia shot 20 years ago that is filled with new buildings and new young people hanging around with the same old reckless beliefs that they don’t need anything better to do, because they will live forever. And then Zhao gives Li a hug and, for the last time, leaves him.

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Everything echoes. Zhao initially cracks a smile on seeing that mechanical avatar of cheery consumption at the store, because here is the real version of that friendly robot she watched on TV all those years ago, and if the future is not what it’s cracked up to be it’s still here. Jia captures footage of joyful citizens parading through the streets to celebrate Bejing’s selection as host city for the 2008 Olympics, the radio in 2022 gives Li updates on Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup, another nation grabbing the spotlight on the global stage with a sporting event. Even the TikTok engagement farming is a song and dance to sell a likely inferior product, just as Zhao was doing when she was young and trying to make a life with Li.

Everything echoes. DiCaprio insists that Infiniti carry no cell phone (of course she does), and by the end of the movie he’s happily scrolling on his own device, more engaged (or is he) with the world. The revolution he was working for has been reverberating through the work of Del Toro and his friends, who after all have been laid siege for hundreds of years, and Del Toro is thrilled to help out a member of the French 75 — to pay tribute to an inspiration and to keep him moving through the world. And the biggest echo is of course Infiniti, who carries instruction from DiCaprio and has to reckon with the example of and repercussions of her mother’s actions.

Everything echoes. Taylor never appears again after that lengthy prologue, she’s last seen heading across the border, as resolute in her journey as Zhao is in hers to — and away from — Fengjie. But her absence is felt, by Penn and DiCaprio and especially Infinit, who is told over and over again how she is like her mother but does not know the existence and extent of her mother’s betrayal. After DiCaprio and Infiniti’s reunification, he reads her a letter Taylor sent some years ago — after she fled but well into Infiniti’s youth — letting her words from the past finally reach out to make what connection they can. Taylor is still somewhere in the world, although we don’t know if she’s moving through it or planted down, maybe working as a cashier in a grocery somewhere. Li’s reunion with Zhao is just chance, she’s written no letters or even made a phone call. And there’s no sinister cabals or government crackdowns to stop her from doing so. But even in returning back home, she’s moved farther away from her old life than the fractured family of OBAA.

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That movie ends with Infiniti heading out to join a new group of revolutionaries, blasting a 50-year-old song that has never stopped echoing in pop music. I’ve written before about my unease with OBAA’s ending, as stirring as it is. Anderson is savvy enough to know he can’t tune into the contemporary sounds of young people so instead he finds an echo from his time for them to carry forward. Time is getting away from him just as it is DiCaprio, but this is his way of making a claim on the future, of being remembered in some way. 

When Zhao turns away from Li she puts on a reflective vest and joins a throng of similarly-clad joggers, out for their evening run. She’s swimming with the tide, even if that means being alone in a crowd. There’s no music here, just the sound of marching feet moving into the future, but the film itself has been filled with songs, from that rock band on the street to the ballroom dance music at a restored music venue (shown earlier in the film as a decrepit hall that town workers would come dance and meet women in, another echo) to the pounding club tunes Zhao used to groove too. The beat changes, the beat goes on. The movie ends with plague and robots and digital worlds seen through screens, it begins in a room that seemingly has no electricity, in what appears to be documentary footage of people we will not see again in the film. The walls have worn-down pop music posters, the only visible technology is a stove providing what is clearly not enough heat to warm a crowd of women in winter coats, who are nonetheless having a great time shooting the shit and egging each other on to sing love songs. Multiple women wind up performing and they all choose different songs, but each tune ends the same, with the singer laughingly stopping halfway through: “I forget the rest.”