By William Wolf

MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART  Send This Review to a Friend

While “Mountains May Depart,” written and directed by Jia Zhangke, is an involving and well-acted Chinese soap opera, it also nails changes in that vast country that occur within its time periods, 1999, 2014 and imagined future in 2025. Basically, one of the big movements is toward materialism with attendant effects.

The film centers on the at-first young and exuberant Tao, played by attractive Zhao Tao, who works in a store in Fenyang, where the story begins. She is courted by two men. One is the very sympathetic Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), a coal miner of limited means. The other is Zhang Jinshen (Zhang Yi), a flashy fellow whose chief ambition is wealth and status.

Tao rejects the worker, who goes off in a deep funk, in favor of Zhang’s more attractive monetary future. As a result, her life becomes a trajectory of unhappiness.

When their son is born, Zhang names him Dollar, and you can’t get more symbolism than that, both with respect to Zhang’s aspirations and what we know about contemporary China in the international financial world and its influence.

The film also follows what happens to Dollar, who has become estranged from his mother as his controlling father and the new woman in his life dominate him to the point when, as a young man (Zijian Dong), he feels the need to break away. One of the best parts of the film occurs when he becomes attracted to an older woman who provides warmth that he has been missing.

As in most soap operas, the plot gets increasingly complicated. But ever-clear and most important while the lives of the characters are entertainingly explored is what the film implies about the changing landscape of China, which the writer-director obviously knows very well. A Kino Lorber release. Reviewed February 12, 2016.

  

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