The diverging paths of three friends change dramatically over a tumultuous 26 year period…
Making a film with distinct phases to it can have its benefits and pitfalls. On the one hand, it can provide a clear sense of structure to ensure that the film never moves too slowly, but it also means that the audience will compare all of the sections to one another, making a weak section look all the worse if it is surrounded by better, more compelling sections. Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart in all likelihood feels worse than it actually is because of how much worse one part of it is.
Mountains May Depart is an epic family saga spanning 26 years, told in three phases. The first is in 1999, when entrepreneur Jinsheng (Zhang Yi), and mine worker Liangzi (Liang Jing Dong) are both competing for the heart of Tao (Zhao Tao, A Touch of Sin), though she ultimately chooses the cockier man with a future, Jinsheng. In the next section, set in 2014, we see Tao’s son visit her in Fenyang following her divorce from Jinsheng, and in the final section, set in 2025, we see her son Daole living in Australia with his father and how he tries to break free from his life there.
Jia has a clear strength for slowly building character through subtle interaction, building the film around these characters and allowing things to develop from there. He does as well as he always does in that regard here, with the slight misstep in having Jinsheng act almost as comic relief at some points.
It’s too obvious that the audience is supposed to want Tao to end up with Liangzi, and Jia overplays his hand with how comically awful Jinsheng is. He never gives off any sense of warmth or humanity, which makes Tao’s marriage to him feel more like a plot device than the result of a difficult decision, especially because the early parts of the film are told almost entirely through the male characters.
This means that Tao isn’t given enough chance to develop before she becomes the sole focalising figure in the second stage. It’s ambitious on Jia’s part, but the script could have been helped by not being quite as blunt, and by giving Tao a greater sense of agency in the first part of the film.
Despite these misgivings, the first two sections are still packed with all manner of emotion, and by the final third the audience is incredibly invested in the character of Tao. Zhao Tao delivers another powerhouse performance, portraying two markedly different versions of the same character with equal aplomb.
She’s adorable in her girl-next-door role in 1999, and carries a remarkable amount of gravitas as a small business owner in 2014. Because of the distance between these two periods, she makes it utterly believable that this is the same character nonetheless, but altogether less naive and more world-weary. She is the glue that binds these sections together, and her relative absence in the third section is part of what makes it feel like an anticlimax.
One can’t ignore the largest issue with the near future section in Australia, though: Dong Zijiang is completely lacking in charisma in his role as Tao and Jinsheng’s son Daole. Perhaps he would be better saying his lines in Mandarin, but his entire role is in English and none of the words that come out of his mouth sound convincing, nullifying the tension that there could have been in the scenes when he fights with his father. The script also takes a nosedive in this section, as the central drama is something I found very hard to care about, full of events that seemed to happen at complete random.
The reason why this is such a disappointment is because the first two sections seemed to have such a natural progression into each other. The first section is probably where the film peaks, mainly because of Jia’s entertaining use of 90s aesthetics to create the atmosphere, but also because of how the three central characters work with each other so well; the main actors creating a wonderful, yet strained screen friendship.
Therefore, the second section is tragic because of how disparate they all are, how cold their interactions are when they see each other again. It’s their story that we are invested in, and it’s not as if Daole’s story gives anything of an image of what life is like for the characters now, beyond Jinsheng being obsessed with the concept of freedom and being able to purchase firearms.
It’s not just that the audience is disappointed with the lack of the characters they had grown to love, that could have been played for powerful effect, its rather that this final thread of the narrative feels tangential, from a story hardly worth telling that we have no stake in whatsoever.
All this adds up to a frustrating film to review. As much as possible, it should be commended for its first two thirds which, although slightly janky, are charming, romantic, powerful, and tragic in all manner of ways at many different points. The three leads are all wonderful in their roles, but Zhao Tao deserves particular commendation for her complete domination of the screen in any scene she is in. Long-time collaborator and husband Jia seems to get the best out of her and her performance her cements them as one of the best director-actor partnerships the cinematic world has to offer right now.
My word, though, how the film loses its grip of the narrative thread and the audience’s attention as it progresses. Ending on a weak note is a cardinal sin; it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Worst of all, it makes it feel like all of the hard work that the director and actors had put in up to that point to make a compelling narrative was for nought. Mountains May Depart could have been so much greater than the sum of its parts, but instead, you’re left wishing that one of those parts didn’t exist.