Film Analysis: Mountain May Apart
Mountain May Apart
It is a sad story themed around divergence. The poetic movie title gives it a clue – mountain may apart – almost all the characters fade away from each other’s life during this two-hour film. There are more discrepancies hidden beneath layers of symbols and icons throughout the film. The film is a puzzle waiting to be unpacked.
The red Volkswagen, the privatization of mining, and the year of 1999 contextualized the rapid change occurring in the fast-growing Chinese economy started near the end of last century. It was nostalgic to me. Yet in watching the first part of the film so the nostalgia soon wore off. My dad had his first car in 1996, also a red Volkswagen, as if it was yesterday. I was inevitably nostalgic, however, …show more content…
The segregation has started to form among people. The rich and poor probably grew up together in the same hood playing with the same mud on the riverbank. Until the about-to-be-rich started to make a fortune from the local gas station and went on a completely different path, as said in the film “we were no more friends.” Since then, we have had the class differentiation in China. The rich has become richer; the poor has struggled but been getting …show more content…
It is chaotic: the father's inability to communicate with son, their disagreement on the conception of freedom, a young boy’s love with his teacher, a 1960s model American muscle car drove around the 2025 landscape of Australia. As the reality gradually disappears, we are surrounded by a kind of surreality, and absurdity becomes a part of our daily life. This absurdity keeps eroding our feelings and our senses of being, we become even less likely to think and take any action.
If we look all three parts together, the segregation between the rich and poor, the unbalanced development among cities, and conflicts between ideologies, the result is Foucault's concept of heterotopia, the alternative space between utopia and reality. It is a blunt, mesmerizing portrait of a conflicted society. Contemporary Chinese landscapes are not only evidence of constant renovations, they also embody collective delusions of a changing society. Does it change at all?
“I’m getting the feeling of Déjà vu.”
“[…] But life just repeats
It is a sad story themed around divergence. The poetic movie title gives it a clue – mountain may apart – almost all the characters fade away from each other’s life during this two-hour film. There are more discrepancies hidden beneath layers of symbols and icons throughout the film. The film is a puzzle waiting to be unpacked.
The red Volkswagen, the privatization of mining, and the year of 1999 contextualized the rapid change occurring in the fast-growing Chinese economy started near the end of last century. It was nostalgic to me. Yet in watching the first part of the film so the nostalgia soon wore off. My dad had his first car in 1996, also a red Volkswagen, as if it was yesterday. I was inevitably nostalgic, however, …show more content…
The segregation has started to form among people. The rich and poor probably grew up together in the same hood playing with the same mud on the riverbank. Until the about-to-be-rich started to make a fortune from the local gas station and went on a completely different path, as said in the film “we were no more friends.” Since then, we have had the class differentiation in China. The rich has become richer; the poor has struggled but been getting …show more content…
It is chaotic: the father's inability to communicate with son, their disagreement on the conception of freedom, a young boy’s love with his teacher, a 1960s model American muscle car drove around the 2025 landscape of Australia. As the reality gradually disappears, we are surrounded by a kind of surreality, and absurdity becomes a part of our daily life. This absurdity keeps eroding our feelings and our senses of being, we become even less likely to think and take any action.
If we look all three parts together, the segregation between the rich and poor, the unbalanced development among cities, and conflicts between ideologies, the result is Foucault's concept of heterotopia, the alternative space between utopia and reality. It is a blunt, mesmerizing portrait of a conflicted society. Contemporary Chinese landscapes are not only evidence of constant renovations, they also embody collective delusions of a changing society. Does it change at all?
“I’m getting the feeling of Déjà vu.”
“[…] But life just repeats