Mountains May Depart review: This chinese film is a disappointment, even for JioMAMI audience

Jia Zhangke blew us away two years ago at the Mumbai Film Festival with A Touch of Sin – a brutal and often hilarious takedown of the many ironies and ignominies of contemporary China.

Mountains May Depart neither fully harks back to the themes of A Touch of Sin nor does it tell a completely fresh character based story, it’s somewhere in between both those elements and thereby a frustrating watch.

On paper Mountains is a far more ambitious effort than Jhangke’s previous work. The film spans three different timelines with recurring characters as they adapt and change to China’s rapidly changing face. The first story takes place around December 1999 – Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’ begins playing as a woman (Zhao Tao) dances in a group to usher the New Year in. A Saajan like love story plays out as the woman keeps shuttling between two men who both love her deeply. Not only is this segment corny but also overlong and soap operatic with more than just a touch of Bollywood style drama.

The second story takes place in the present as the wife of a man dying of cancer seeks monetary help from the woman in the love triangle from the previous story. The lyrics of ‘Go West’ that opens the film find some meaning in the third story which is set in Australia as a Chinese boy, uncomfortable with his upbringing in the West decides to take off.

The problem is none of the story threads have any genuine power to keep things interesting. Unlike in Touch of Sin where a central theme connected the dots this time a very tedious thread of a boy dealing with mommy issues ties things together. And when a film about a kid encountering the Oedipal complex is this uninteresting you have a serious problem at hand. The conflicts are simplistic, their resolutions are convenient and the execution is contrived. There is a subplot featuring a female school teacher dealing with an ex husband bleeding her dry for alimony but the role reversal is awkwardly directed and put of place.

There is little in the film’s third segment that portrays how China would turn out to be in the future, or what effect it would have on those who stay abroad. The only glimpses of the future you get are shiny glass built phones and user interfaces. Computer software is utilized as a conflict in a terribly ham-fisted manner – the father cannot speak in English and the son can’t speak Chinese, so the father is closer to Google Translate than his child. The fact that machines in the future may replace humans as the recipients of human emotions is obvious, and far better films have been made on the subject. With Jhangke’s excellent filmography you’d expect a deeper meditation into the theme, but it never comes in Mountains May Depart.

There’s probably some subtext that Chinese audiences can probably grasp in the film, but for an outsider this is the first big disappointment of the 2015 Mumbai Film Festival.

Watch Mountains May Depart at JioMAMI Mumabi Film Festival on Nov 2 at 3:00 pm, and on Nov 3 at 3:45 pm. Check out the schedule for venues here .

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