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Mountains May Depart(山河故人)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

China, France, Japan · 2015
2h 11m
Director Jia Zhangke
Starring Zhao Tao, Sylvia Chang, Dong Zijian, Zhang Yi
Genre Drama, Romance

In 1999, in Fenyang, China, Tao finds herself the object of two men’s affection. Liangzi, a laborer in a local coal mine, is a good friend, but Tao is more attracted to Jinsheng, a well-off gas station owner with a cruel streak. The film charts the impact of her choice over the next two decades.

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What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

60

Screen International by Dan Fainaru

Using his characters as pawns on the chessboard of history, Mountains May Depart culminates in a nostalgic future where the Chinese look back for the identity they have lost.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

While that awkward final section shows Jia's lack of assurance working in English, the misstep is instantly erased in a beautiful concluding sequence that reaffirms the film's aching depth of feeling and extraordinary sense of place.

83

Hitfix by Gregory Ellwood

Jia probably made a mistake directing the 1999 sequence in such an over-the-top and stilted tone (it also feels more like 1989 than the turn of the century), but the rest of the film is incredibly well done.

63

Slant Magazine by Jake Cole

It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.

60

CineVue by John Bleasdale

As every section seeks to deepen and complicate the basic message of Mountains May Depart - that the incredible speed of technology and society has its prices and dangers - and the failure of the final section dilutes where it should intensify.

58

The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton

Zhangke's always had a throughline regarding economic inequality and the 21st century-style Chinese capitalism in his work, but Mountains May Depart might be the director's defining statement on the way that his nation has changed over the past few decades. If only he were a touch subtler about it.

80

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.

80

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Its generation-spanning story has serious power, and, in its masterful opening chapter and final sequence, brushes against greatness.

80

Variety by Scott Foundas

If “Mountains” feels a touch schematic at times, and awkward in its third-act English-language scenes, the cumulative impact is still enormously touching, highlighted by Jia’s rapturous image-making and a luminous central performance by the director’s regular muse (and wife), Zhao Tao.

60

Village Voice by Scott Tobias

It's a powerful idea in the abstract, the culmination of three acts that cover a 25-year catastrophe with a time-lapse breathlessness. It just never leaves the abstract and becomes flesh.

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