MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke, with Zhao Tao, Dong Zijian, Sylvia Chang and Zhang Yi. A Films We Like release. 127 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (March 4). See listing.
It’s halfway through TIFF, and I’m sitting down with Jia Zhang-ke to discuss his new film, Mountains May Depart. We’re equally weary I’ve been running full tilt for weeks, and he’s spent days on the Platform jury, going to screenings and meetings. Spending a day discussing his own movie, he tells me through an interpreter, makes for a nice change.
And there’s plenty to talk about. Mountains May Depart is a triptych spanning a quarter-century in the life of Tao, a Chinese woman played by Jia’s wife and long-time collaborator Zhao Tao.
“I wanted to portray the consumer culture that’s all-pervasive in current-day China,” he says, “and the way the rampant economic and technological changes have begun to encroach on our inner life and our inner feelings. I wanted to make a film about time and feelings, and of course with this you have to start in the past.”
The film opens in 1999, when Tao is a young woman being courted by a miner (Liang Jingdong) and a swaggering capitalist (Zhang Yi), then revisits her in 2014, when she longs for her absent son, Dollar. In the film’s final movement, in 2025, Tao travels to Australia to see the grown Dollar (now played by Dong Zijian).
“I wanted to portray the growing phenomenon of people’s migration and the emigration out of China,” he says. “A lot of people have left the country, including my good friends. I wanted to trace how each person does this, step by step – they eventually leave their home town to find a new life – and what that means for their further fates individually. So the film had to start very close to home, and end very far away.”
Migration is a theme that runs through most of Jia’s work, and it doesn’t always go well. In Still Life, villagers are displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project in A Touch Of Sin, people who come from the country to the city for work are exploited or even destroyed. But they keep coming, because there’s nothing left for them at home.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about why some people decide to stay home and not move, and why some people decide to leave and go very, very far away,” he says. “It became about this, and a very complex series of emotions welled up in me. And what’s kind of tragic is that now a lot of people leave because of the pollution. Before, they left because of the poverty now it’s because of the quality of the air.”
It’s clear watching the film that Jia regards those who stay with a sort of admiration. He says he’s celebrating their vitality.
“I find this quality in a lot of Chinese people,” he says. “The will to continue no matter how much strife they’ve experienced in their lifetime. This really affects me and moves me a great deal. I said a lot of people are leaving the country because of the air pollution, but a lot of people are still living there.
“They’re still dancing, with their masks.”
Be sure to see our review of Mountains May Depart.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
