Mountains May Depart movie review (2016)

The most lauded of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers, Jia has always evinced a confidence and a seriousness of purpose that are on fine display in “Mountains May Depart,” another intimate journey through history that’s as stirring and beautifully nuanced as anything he’s made. Though perhaps the greatest of recent Chinese films, it does, however, have a significant drawback that must be acknowledged at the outset.

The film’s story moves its characters through three different time periods, from 1999 to 2014 and then 2025. The first two transpire in China and center on a character played by Jia’s muse (and wife) Zhao Tao, whose performance is truly brilliant and the film’s emotional linchpin. The third part, which takes place mainly in Australia, finds Zhao’s character not entirely absent but sidelined to the point that the movie inevitably suffers.

As its time frame might suggest, the thematic center of the new film is the destabilizing impact of market-driven prosperity on China from the ‘90s till now. Set, as many earlier Jia films are, in the director’s hometown of Fenyang, in northern China, the story’s first part (which is also the longest) starts with the nation celebrating the approach of the year 2000. It’s a happy, celebratory time, due not just to the chronological landmark but also the newfound wealth and relative freedoms that have transformed China.

When we first see vivacious Shen Tao (Zhao), she’s in millennial party mode, leading a young dance troupe in an infectious routine set to the Pet Shop Boys’ version of “Go West” (Jia’s witty use of international pop music remains a trademark). But the abundance that much of China is enjoying has a problematic romantic corollary for Tao, who’s being pursued by two men. The roughly handsome, taciturn Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), a mine worker, never really confesses his feelings but they are obvious enough. His rival, Zhang Jiansheng (Zhang Yi), on the other hand, is a glad-handing nouveau-capitalist who’s constantly offering gifts and other demonstrations of his affection.