Mountains May Depart
Entry updated 29 July 2024. Tagged: Film.
Chinese film (2015). Original title Shānhé Gùrén ["Old Friends Among the Mountains and Rivers"]. Xstream Pictures, Shanghai Film Group, MK2. Written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke. Cast includes Dong Zijian, Liang Jingdong, Zhang Yi and Zhao Tao. 131 minutes. Colour.
A film in three parts, one set in 1999, one in 2014, and one in the Near Future of 2025. In 1999, shopkeeper Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) chooses to marry Jinsheng (Zhang Yi), a well off but somewhat sadistic petrol station owner, rather than Liangzi (Liang Jingdong), her poorer best friend. In 2014, they are divorced, with a seven-year-old son living with his father and distant from his mother, even when he visits for her funeral. She gives him the keys to her house so he can visit whenever he wishes. In 2025, the son, Dollar (Dong Zijian) is living in Australia, planning to drop out of college, and having a relationship with his older English language teacher, Mia (Sylvia Chang). He constantly fights with his father and has not seen his mother for years. The film ends with him planning to fly to China with Mia to visit his mother, but no reunion is shown.
Leading Chinese director Jia (1970- ) has won many festival awards for his low-key but razor-sharp dissections of contemporary China, particularly among disaffected youth. Recent films have seen him incorporate genre elements into this analysis, including sf here, and Wuxia in A Touch of Sin (2013). The last segment of this film also marks his first foray into English-language filmmaking. Unfortunately, he is at his least comfortable in the near future setting, and working in English. The stilted dialogue and desultory attempts to convey the world of 2025 (Technology has barely changed, and the characters seem bizarrely reluctant to engage with the online world) diffuse the effect of the much sharper earlier sections.
Jia's other film with minor sf elements is Still Life (2005), a largely realist depiction of lives changed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, with some unexplained background details of a UFO and a building taking off like a Rocket, which serve to disrupt the drama in memorable fashion. [CWa]
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