‘Mountains May Depart‘ (the original title is ‘Shan he gu ren‘), from 2015, is the most ambitious of Zhangke Jia‘s films to date. To a large extent, the Chinese director abandons the minimalist and classic style of his previous films to bring to the screen a story that takes place in three different periods of time: past, present and future. The characters traverse the recent history of China, the present with its uncertainties and contradictions and they are also imagined in the not too distant future. Zhangke Jia manages to describe and comment socially and morally on the spectacular evolution of Chinese society in recent decades, but also to address universal issues that can be considered current themes and understood anywhere else in the world: tradition and modernity, love and jealousy, child-growing and intergenerational conflicts, aging and difficulty adapting to change, migrant problems and homesickness. It is a film that opened a window for me to the people of China today and captivated me with the issues and the cinematic means by which it is brought to the screen.
The first part of the film takes place in Fenyang, the city where director Zhangke Jia was born and where the stories of many of his films take place. We are in 1999, on the threshold of the new millennium, an era full of hope but also of radical changes in China. The film’s heroes are 25 years old, so they belong to a generation born and raised after the traumatic period of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a generation made up of those who adapt to the transition to the capitalist economy, abandoning ideology and many Chinese traditions, and other who find it harder or they are unwilling to abandon traditional moral perceptions and ways of life. Two boys and a girl form a classic love trio, friends until the two boys (the ambitious capitalist Jinsheng and the ‘proletarian’ Liangzi) fall in love with the same girl (Tao, played by Tao Zhao, the director’s wife and muse). The story is told delicately, the young woman has to choose and her choice can not remain without traumatic consequences.
The second part takes place in 2014, the year in which ‘Mountains May Depart‘ was filmed, so in the ‘present’. Jinsheng has become a wealthy tycoon and took his son to Shanghai where he is educated at an ‘international school’. He and Tao are divorced. Liangzi is sick with a lung disease due to work in the coal mines and needs help. The death of the grandfather brings the couple’s seven-year-old son back to Fenyang, and the chasm created between the mother and the culturally uprooted child is painful. This part is again delicately narrated, with an emphasis on the meeting and evolution of the relationship between mother and son (who had received the expressive name ‘Dollar’).
The third part takes place in 2025, so in the future of 2014. China is a superpower, its currency is the strongest! Jinsheng with Dollar emigrated to Australia, but the conflict deepens between the father, who is rich but unhappy, violent and maladapted, and the teenage son who tries to relearn the forgotten Chinese language and rebuild the bridges to the mother he was separated from, even through a relationship with a woman much older than him, perhaps a ‘surrogate mother’. Here, too, we are dealing with an intimate and interesting theme, but the cinematographic treatment is less successful, maybe because the story was moved to a geographical and cultural space with which the screenwriter-director is less familiar.
So, can it be said that we are dealing with three different films with the same heroes? Each section certainly has enough material for a full movie, but the characters are interconnected, sentiments persist over time, and past deeds have consequences now and in the future. The film begins with a group of young people (including the heroes) dancing to the upbeat song ‘Go West’ by Village People, in the version made famous by the Pet Shop Boys, and ends with Tao reminiscing and dancing, alone now, on the same song. It is a symbolic song for the generation that lived the liberation from communism, I knew it from Eastern Europe where I was living at that time, and now I find out that it was popular in China as well. The beautiful final scene is about the closing of a lifetime cycle and the persistence of feelings in the fight against aging. Zhangke Jia‘s film is extremely detailed in the two sections dedicated to the past and the present, full of symbols and references to traditional culture. Even if the third part seems a little stylistically dissonant and less authentic, the whole thing works. The characters are a little too Manichaestic in the way they are constructed, but the actors’ performances make up for it, especially that of the formidable Tao Zhao. The cinematography (signed by Yu Lik Wai) is extremely refined, with a movement of the camera worthy of the great masters of the art of film. I recommend ‘Mountains May Depart‘ to anyone who wants to know more about the recent history of China as it has been lived by its people, but also to fans of quality family dramas.