Rating summary
| Movie |  | 3.5 |
| Video |  | 4.0 |
| Audio |  | 4.5 |
| Extras |  | 3.0 |
| Overall | | 4.0 |
Mountains May Depart Blu-ray Movie Review
Reviewed by Brian Orndorf July 5, 2016
Threads of time are knotted carefully by director Jia Zhangke in “Mountains May Depart,” which attempts to explore the lives of three characters as they experience 25 years of Chinese cultural and economic development and their own maturity. Taking place in 1999, 2014, and 2025, the picture successfully creates a broad sweep of life, tracking emotional and physical growth in an unusual way. It’s an emotional effort, though it commences with more subtlety than it concludes with, fighting off the artificiality of melodrama for the most part, ultimately growing too fatigued to better balance a disappointing third act.
A love triangle resides at the heart of “Mountains May Depart,” following the ambition and ultimate dejection of Tao (Tao Zhao), Jinsheng (Yi Zhang), and Liangzi (Jing Dong Liang), who emerge as young people with open hearts, only to find the cruelties of life disrupting their dreams. The production samples teary heartache, but it’s most profound during depictions of grief, with literal and symbolic death touching these lives as the characters grow to understand their place in the world. It’s a gorgeously photographed journey that showcases shifting aspect ratios to underline experience, and performances cut deep more often than not.
Mountains May Depart Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality
"Mountains My Depart" is an unusual viewing experience, with the AVC encoded presentation covering three aspect ratios, each defining a time period. Though the bulk of the effort was shot in 2014, certain 1999 scenes were captured during that era, offered here in a rough video state, with plenty of artifacting. Modern cinematography fares much better, delivering a bright, clean image that's excellent with detail, seizing facial particulars and location textures. Colors are bold, handling fresh primaries, while skintones are natural. Delineation is acceptable. Some banding is detected.
Mountains May Depart Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality
The 5.1 DTS-HD MA sound mix retains the feature's intimacy quite well, but some active elements manage to attract attention, including booming explosions and thumping pop music, which also seeps into the surrounds, along with atmospherics. Dialogue is crisp, but broken English still reigns in the final act, making some exchanges difficult to understand. Disappointingly, English subtitles are only offered for the 1999 and 2014 segments.
Mountains May Depart Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras
- Booklet (10 pages) contains an essay by Aliza Ma.
- "New York Film Festival: A Conversation with Jia Zhangke" (73:06, HD) is an extended discussion with the filmmaker about his career and creative choices, filtered through two rounds of translation for every question.
- And a Theatrical Trailer (1:57, HD) is included.
Mountains May Depart Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation
The 2025 segment takes the story to Australia to explore the loss of Chinese culture and the pain of isolation, but "Mountains May Depart" loses concentration on the details of drama, going broad as a way to find a conclusion to a story that feels like it began as a small idea to help understand national growth, and blossomed quickly, just beyond the helmer's control. A disorienting shift toward the obvious doesn't destroy "Mountains May Depart," but it does leave it lacking where it counts the most.
