MCLC: New Jia Zhangke film "Mountains May Depart"

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New Jia Zhangke film “Mountains May Depart”
Source: China Real Time, WSJ (10/28/15)
Censors May Depart: New Jia Zhangke Film Will Grace China’s Big Screen
By Olivia Geng
Two years ago, Jia Zhangke’s gritty film “A Touch of Sin” won best screenplay at Cannes – but was blocked from release in mainland China.
Now, the acclaimed Chinese director is out with a new work that, while it didn’t bring home an award at Cannes, has won the thumbs-up from China’s censors: “Mountains May Depart” has been previewed in various cities and will have its official China premiere on October 30.
“This is a big victory of insisting — a victory for my film,” Mr. Jia said at a press conference last weekend, an event he described as “a festival for myself.”
“I thought ‘A Touch of Sin’ would make it to theaters, but it couldn’t. So I made ‘Mountains May Depart.’ This one can finally be shown in public. It’s a big day!” Mr. Jia said.
Compared with “A Touch of Sin,” which weaves together four violent narratives inspired by real-life events, “Mountains May Depart” is much softer. And instead of presenting a series of vignettes, the film follows one family’s development over the course of 26 years.
The story is divided into three parts—1999, 2014 and the near future, 2025.
The first describes the main character Tao (played by Jia Zhangke’s wife Zhao Tao), a young teacher who lives in Fenyang, a small town in northern China’s Shanxi province. She gets involved in a love triangle with two men—Liang Zi, a coal miner, and Zhang Jinsheng, a rich gas station and coal mine owner. She eventually chooses the richer man, marries him and gives birth to a son, Dollar.
In the second part, Tao is divorced from Jinsheng and still lives in the small town in Shanxi while her son lives with his father, who is now a successful businessman in Shanghai. Tao’s father dies suddenly and seven-year-old son Dollar returns for the funeral. Liang Zi, meanwhile, has returned to his hometown because he has cancer. He still makes a living coal mining in another province but can’t afford his medication, so his wife goes to Tao for help.
In the final part, set in 2025, Dollar is a college student and is living with his father in Australia. The young man falls in love with his Chinese language teacher, Mia (played by Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang), who is older than his mother.
Asked at last weekend’s press conference whether the couple’s yawning age gap is problematic, Dong Zijian, the actor who plays Dollar, replied: “As long as there is love, nothing can be a problem.”
Jia Zhangke, born in 1970, is considered a leading figure among China’s “sixth-generation” independent filmmakers. His early works, including the underground hit “The Pickpocket” or “Xiao Wu,” focus on portraying the lives of people excluded from China’s economic boom.
For many viewers outside the country, Mr. Jia’s movies are one of the most direct methods of understanding contemporary China. But “Mountains May Depart,” like Mr. Jia’s previous works, has received mixed reviews in his home country. Some have criticized the story as lacking sophistication, while others have balked at the theme of teacher-student love.
“The age gap is 40 years!” wrote one Weibo microblogger. “Hard to understand,” wrote another.
On Douban, a Chinese website that allows people to rate films, books and music, some argue that Mr. Jia caters to Western tastes in order to win awards. But others contend the director is simply trying to depict the transformation in Chinese people’s lives amid an ever-changing international economy.
“I’m from a small place in Shanxi and didn’t leave there until I was 21 years old,” Mr. Jia said. “The reason I made this film is because life is full of uncertainty and unexpectedness.”
–Olivia Geng. Follow her on Twitter @keikogfy.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 29, 2015
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