In Jia Zhangke’s “Mountains May Depart” – a generational triptych spanning more than 25 years, multiple continents and several languages – lives are fractured and remade by the geometric romances and overwhelming modernity of a new century. Fates twist and weave through the film’s novel-like plot, working best in the hazy realm of reaction and transition. As the narrative digresses and the camera drifts, the ripples of the past affect the present.
“Mountains May Depart” begins with a familiar premise – three twenty-somethings get mixed up in a love triangle sure to end in sadness. Two men, Jinsheng (Zhang Yi) and Liangzi (Liang Jing Dong), are divided by class and attitude. Jinsheng is a capitalist darling. Brash, he drives a nice red car and sports a leather jacket. Liangzi, a coal miner, is quieter and more reserved. The lives of the two men intersect through their conflicting love for Tao (Zhao Tao). Though Tao seems hesitant to shut either man out of her life completely, Jinsheng explicitly demands such an act. Characters enter and exit the frame-narrative, but the camera always fixates on the stragglers and the slow, those who only spring to action when the opportunity has long passed.
Throughout “Mountains May Depart,” Jia’s camera resolutely commits to elements of visual interest. As two characters interact and emote, Jia fixates on one person, even as the space’s unseen half progresses off-screen. They listen, they gaze and they respond. The camera’s rare movements naturalistically attempt to highlight what’s important within each shot. Once this quiet information is established, the camera leaps back, contemplating characters from afar, capturing patterns on hard gravel-dirt and stretched cliff faces of unmarked terrain. Because “Mountains May Depart” digresses so much, such formal consistency enhances both the story’s emotional impact and the film’s re-adjusted sense of narrative.
Within the fatalistic melodrama of “Mountains May Depart,” Jia weaves another tale of a changing China struggling to reconcile its domestic past with a global future. The tragic obsession with money and firearms is fully realized and counteracted by the film’s bursts into documentary-style realism. Jia’s images juxtapose the desolation of China’s urban centers with occasional lyrical-musical interludes. He reveals what citizens have lost amid China’s economic growth — a loss that includes corporate-capitalist-cool figures like Jinsheng.
The film’s generational digressions nearly lose their power in the third and final story, as allusion and metaphor threaten to overwhelm the realist world built in the first two-thirds. Déjà vu is explicitly invoked, Freud is suggested and Jia’s careful constructions turn pointed and contrived. But even as the narrative momentarily flattens some of its well-observed pain, Jia returns to an image evocative enough to pull us back from the brink of miserable coincidence. Tao swings her arms in cathartic concert, dancing in the snow to “Go West” by The Pet Shop Boys. The flakes fall, the figure is framed and moving. As one of the characters in “Mountains May Depart” remarks, time doesn’t change everything, even if it remakes your world.
“Mountains May Depart” opens March 11 at the Roxie Theater and the Four Star Theater in San Francisco.
Contact Connor Huchton at chuchton ‘at’ stanford.edu.