Moun­tains May Depart

It’s ener­vat­ing to chart the progress of Chi­nese direc­tor Jia Zhangke. He has moved away from stark, polit­i­cal­ly cor­ro­sive inquiries into eco­nom­ic dis­place­ment and the shift­ing sands of the Chi­nese land­scape, to chan­nel sim­i­lar themes into more, shall we say, broad­ly approach­able pack­ages. Moun­tains May Depart is an impres­sive trip­tych fea­ture which com­bines a florid fam­i­ly melo­dra­ma with themes of tra­di­tion, tech­nol­o­gy, pride and ram­pant globalisation.

The film opens in gala fash­ion, as Jia muse Zhao Tao – deliv­er­ing an aston­ish­ing per­for­mance – dances to the Pet Shop Boys’ ver­sion of ​‘Go West’ in the year 1999. Ini­tial­ly set in the min­ing town of Fengyang, the film care­ful­ly sets up a frac­tious love tri­an­gle between shop clerk Tao, a wheel­er-deal­er who wants to take her away from the squalor, Jin­sheng (Zhang Yi), and a self-hat­ing work­ing class labour­er, Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), who sees her as his roman­tic equal.

The open­ing chap­ter charts the emo­tion­al push and pull between the char­ac­ters while keep­ing one eye close­ly on the rot­ten sys­tem that dri­ves these peo­ple to make the deci­sions they do. The film soon skips for­ward to 2014, and then lat­er, to a futur­is­tic ren­der­ing of Aus­tralia in 2025 which fea­tures a mighty fine broad­side aimed at Google Trans­late. As is cus­tom­ary for Jia, any scin­til­la of ini­tial hope is crushed and then crushed again, as his char­ac­ters are put through the ringer in the name of a with­er­ing cul­tur­al critique.

Even con­sid­er­ing the few moments that don’t quite gel (the 2025 seg­ment occa­sion­al­ly feels a lit­tle half-cocked), it’s a unique and eccen­tric achieve­ment from one of the most con­sis­tent­ly chal­leng­ing, excit­ing and angry film­mak­ers cur­rent­ly on the cir­cuit. It’s a shame, then, that UK audi­ences have had to wait two years for it, as it pre­miered in com­pe­ti­tion at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.