By Chris Kriofske
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Zhangke Jia
Starring: Fan Liao | Feng Xiaogang | Tao Zhao | Xu Zheng | Zhang Yibai
Original language title: Jiang hu er nü
Country: china, france, japan
Year: 2019
Running time: 136
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7298400/reference
Chris says: “Jia Zhangke’s last film, MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART is my favorite of his assessments of how much China has evolved in his lifetime; although this repeats many of that film’s tropes (plus sneaks in a callback to STILL LIFE, my second-favorite film of his), rarely does it feel derivative or redundant. His perennial muse Zhao Tao keeps improving with each feature and the circa-2006 middle section might be the most emotionally open Zhangke’s ever allowed himself to be. The last third feels truncated in comparison, and ‘YMCA’ on the soundtrack, while fun, doesn’t land as profoundly as the previous film’s inspired use of Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’ (another Village People song!) Still, this often feels like the sort of human-scale epic Zhang Yimou used to excel at in the ’90s, and that’s not faint praise.”