​Personal drama examines life in modern China

“Mountains May Depart” (2015), written and directed by acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke, came out on Blu-ray this month from Kino Video.

It’s Zhangke’s first narrative feature since his Cannes Palme d’Or nominee “A Touch of Sin” (2013), which Kino released to Blu-ray in 2014. Both films are effective critiques of social problems and alienation that are by no means limited to modern China.

In “A Touch of Sin” Zhangke looked at the growth of violence in China in four loosely-connected stories inspired by actual incidents. Each deals with an average individual pushed to some sort of extreme action after pressures of daily life, sense of injustice, oppression, repression, and/or depression, build up to a boiling point.

Long periods of quiet observation contrast with moments of bloody violence. These convey a sense of the paradoxes and struggles of contemporary life in a China newly embracing capitalism and modern conveniences but with no less corruption, government inaction, and exploitation of the working classes than before.

The film shows how easy it is for people to submit to their plight and ignore things, to compromise their ideals, to take unfair advantage of others, or to explode in pent-up outrage, yet there is a faint underlying glimmer of hope by the end that human decency can survive.

As powerful as certain scenes are, “A Touch of Sin” is also often frustratingly vague and sketchy about its central protagonists, as the four half-hour or so episodes don’t have time to explore their characters in greater detail or provide more dramatic closure. Of course that may well be part of the point.

“Mountains May Depart,” on the other hand, makes the personal drama and individual characterizations much more important, with family domestic melodrama taking an equal balance to the overall social backdrop. With a number of autobiographical elements, it’s not a sequel, but it is an effective follow-up to the themes of “A Touch of Sin,” using a rather different style.

Zhangke focuses closely on mostly the same three or four main characters through three consecutive time periods: 1999 and shortly thereafter, around 2014 when the film was shot, and in an imagined 2025, just a decade into the future. It covers a quarter-century, a full generation, of extremely rapid socioeconomic change in China that has serious effects on the individuals as well as on the country.

Each of the three sections is shot in a different aspect ratio to help differentiate them. Portions of the 1999 sequence also incorporate original documentary footage Zhangke shot at that time (using a standard-definition video camera, so the sharpness drops drastically during those scenes).

The first section is the longest of the three, running about 50 minutes. It’s the story of three young adults, two men and a woman, who have been childhood friends, and must choose their new direction in life as opportunities expand with China’s new economy. One man is happy working at a coal mine, while the other is more ambitious and winds up buying the mine when coal prices drop. Trouble brews when both men are in love with their mutual girlfriend, and she likes both of them but decides to marry the wealthy and more aggressive one. A few years later their son is born and the successful businessman father names him “Dollar.”

In the second section, by 2014, the couple is now divorced and the son lives with his father in the big city. Now a schoolboy, he visits his mother to attend his grandfather’s funeral, while the father is planning to move to Australia for better opportunities. Meanwhile the other man has married and had a baby but he’s also developed lung cancer.

The final section in 2025 is arguably the most interesting and significant, and takes place largely in Australia. It deals mostly with the now college-age son, who is resentful of his father, does not really want to continue his education, and is conflicted about what he wants to do for the future. He has also largely forgotten his native tongue and speaks only English. On top of that, he develops a romantic attraction for one of his teachers, a cosmopolitan woman from Toronto via Hong Kong, and about the same age as his mother, whom he has not seen since his grandfather’s funeral over a decade earlier. The mother gets along fine in her hometown and still has not remarried.

The ending is satisfyingly ambiguous with a slightly melancholy sense of hope, and bears certain similarities to Lee Chang-dong’s 2010 Korean film “Poetry.” Life goes on.

To some extent “Mountains May Depart” and “A Touch of Sin” both come off as depicting an ancient civilization that has eagerly joined the 21st century but discovered that in becoming a global economic power it must deal with all of modern civilization’s vices and problems as well as its benefits. “Mountains May Depart” gets more into the human emotion and complexity of its characters, but in slice-of-life fashion still leaves a lot unsaid and unexplained without an obvious “movie” resolution to everything.

Kino’s Blu-ray of “Mountains May Depart” has a good HD image (except for the brief SD scenes), with an aspect ratio that shifts from 1.33 to 1.85 to 2.35, all letterboxed within a 1.85:1 area of the 16x9 frame. If the images had all been windowboxed within a 2.35:1 area, the widening ratios would have been more effective for viewers with projectors and a constant-height screen instead of HDTV monitors stuck with a 16x9 area so the picture must switch between pillarboxing and letterboxing for different ratios.

The sound is fine. Bonus features include an illustrated booklet with a perceptive essay on the film, a trailer, and a 73-minute interview with the director shot at the New York Film Festival.

MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART on Blu-ray – Movie: A- / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B-