Description

Official Selection, 2015 Cannes Film Festival
Official Selection, 2015 New York Film Festival
Audience Award (European), 2015 San Sebastian Film Festival
Nominations, Best Film, Best Director, 2015 Golden Horse Awards

Having now reworked the rules of documentary (I Wish I Knew, 24 City) and repurposed the codes of wuxia (A Touch of Sin, SDAFF ’13), Jia Zhang-ke gives his idiosyncratic take on one of Chinese-language cinema’s most enduring genres: the romantic melodrama. MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART starts with a soapy love triangle in 1999, shot in a saturated 4:3 aspect ratio that indeed looks like it was made in another century. Tao (played by Jia’s muse Zhao Tao) fends off two suitors: the ambitious Jinsheng and the working class Liangzi. As they dance around each other, they beam the optimism of the imminent 21^st century and revel in new China’s little luxuries. Tao dances to the Pet Shop Boys, while capitalist Jinsheng so believes money brings happiness he later names his child Dollar.

As the decades pass, the trio breaks off into families swept across China and onto other continents. For ordinary dreamers like them, the excess idealism of that pre-millennial moment gets channeled into doomed romance and the overwrought script of “going west,” leading to a crushing epilogue for the China Dream. A spiritual sequel to Jia’s 2000 masterpiece Platform, MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART looks for the enduring heart of Fenyang kids strewn emotionally and geographically by the tailwind of accelerating global capital. And as is so often the case in Jia’s films, they beat to the arresting melancholy of timeless Cantopop, a musical utopia that never leaves the heart, even as mountains drift apart.  –Brian Hu

Co-presented by: UCSD Chinese Traditional Culture Association

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