Mountains May Depart
53rd New York Film Festival
September 25 - October 11, 2015
An epically scaled canvas of life in contemporary China, Jia Zhangke’s new film spans three decades in the lives of its increasingly estranged characters, from the dawn of the capitalist explosion to the near future.
The plot of Jia Zhangke’s new film is simplicity itself. Fenyang 1999, on the cusp of the capitalist explosion in China. Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) has two suitors—Zhang (Zhang Yi), an entrepreneur-to-be, and his best friend Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), who makes his living in the local coal mine. Shen Tao decides, with a note of regret, to marry Zhang, a man with a future. Flash-forward 15 years: the couple’s son Dollar is paying a visit to his now-estranged mother, and everyone and everything seems to have grown more distant in time and space… and then further ahead in time, to even greater distances. Jia is modern cinema’s greatest poet of drift and the uncanny, slow-motion feeling of massive and inexorable change. Like his 2013 A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart is an epically scaled canvas. But where the former was angry and quietly terrifying, the latter is a heartbreaking prayer for the restoration of what has been lost in the name of progress. A Kino Lorber release.
Essential viewing.
—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
A work of soaring ambition and deeply felt humanism.
—Scott Foundas, Variety
[A] staggeringly ambitious piece of work.
—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
[An] expertly composed and dramatized film.
—Nich Schager, The Village Voice
[An] ambitious, time-jumping, continent-straddling drama.
—Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
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