Mountains May Depart, the new film from Chinese writer/director Jia Zhang-ke, is a 21st century epic family drama operating at the pace of a mid-twentieth century post-war novel. Jia is a master of Chinese cinema, with an emphasis on Chinese. So much so that many US audience-members are likely unfamiliar with this work, despite its international renown. He works in this instance on a reflective, distant palate, and the film is unquestionably a slow burn.
The movement is slow; the film spans 26 years, but does so with no urgency of story. The dramatic action is small; only a handful of characters populate the film, all related to a single woman’s love triangle and resulting child. And the emotional center of the film is remote; Jia’s story is powerful but audiences are never allowed access into the minds of the central characters. We see them act, but wonder at their action. Mountains May Depart clocks in at just over two hours, but with its sparse dialogue and disjointed, semi-related plot segments, Jia stretches those two hours into a lifetime, forcing audiences to feel every second.
It is a vision of China’s past, present, and future, on a scale both national and personal. It is, more, a rich filmic experience.
Mountains May Depart opens at the turn of the new age and new millennium, in 1999. Three childhood friends in Fenyang, China, now grown. Zhiang is the local gas station owner. Liangzi works underground in the coal mines. Both men are in love with Tao. Zhiang is wealthy, Liangzi is loyal and dependable. This first segment of Mountains carries a lightness of romance and seduction and feuding friends.
But such lightness is occasionally interrupted. Jia packs Mountains May Depart with momentary, unexplained visions of Chinese life. At one point, as Tao walks alone down the road, she watches as a single prop airplane crash and explode only feet in front of her. The sight is tragic; but meaningless to Tao, who turns and continues to walk down the street. Shortly thereafter, Tao marries the rich man.
It is this choice that supplies the heart of Mountains May Depart. It propels the story and provides Jia a manner to explore China’s economic past and future. Tao’s decision makes perfect sense: she and Zhiang are friends, after all, and he can provide a future for a family that Liangzi cannot. The couple have a child, which Zhiang names Dollar (as in U.S. Dollars). Liangzi’s disappointment also makes perfect sense: he is a better match for Tao, and he suspects she knows it.
From there, Mountains May Depart jumps forward to 2014, and then to the future, 2025. Jia uses the the three-part structure of past, present, future as a mechanism exploring birth, life and death, though not as directly as one might assume. Tao’s father dies, in 2014, which brings Dollar back from his wealthy childhood to his mother’s hometown and forcing the two back into each other’s lives.
In 2025, Zhiang and Dollar have emigrated to Australia. Zhiang is an alcoholic; Dollar, now in college, no longer speaks Chinese, does not communicate with his father, and barely remembers his mother. In her absence, he begins a romantic relationship with one of his professors. Through this new relationship, Dollar begins the process of reconnecting emotionally with his now distant, forgotten mother.
Each segment of Mountains May Depart is filmed in a different aspect ration (1:33:1 for 1999, 1:85:1 for 2014, 2:39:1 for 20205). These are dramatically different aspect ratios—but it’s not just the size and scale of the image that alters as time changes. The visual and cinematographic styles change as well, moving from a lingering documentarian style in 1999 to a futurist-sleek camera and lighting style in 2025.
In the 1999 and 2014 segments, Jia has also included footage that was shot at random moments in his life, not for any purpose but to collect images. These chance moments of Chinese life, “cannot be reproduced,” Jia said in an interview last year. “The images capture something of the times, the emotions, the values and the culture tastes.” Some of this footage, like festivals and discos, makes narrative sense within the story of Mountains May Depart. Others, like a cargo truck teetering on the edge of falling over, or a sunset at a coal mine, do not.
But the collective effect of all of this visual and thematic information-the aspect ratio changes, the cinematographic choices, the documentary-style footage, and the disparate story pieces-is to leave audiences uncertain of how it all might connect. How does Tao’s life in the junk shop in 1999 lead to the alcoholic rich man collecting guns in Australia in 2025? Do these two things bear any connective weight? Jia asks in Mountains how our individual emotional choices are brought to bear on our national or economic identities? That’s a complex question.
And such a question deserves Mountains May Depart, a complex film. At once a grand cinematic expression and a lesson in restraint, revealing to audiences the barest level of emotional and relational information, leaving us to do the rest.
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