In the NYR Daily, Ian Buruma writes, “Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new movie, Mountains May Depart, begins with a disco dance in a bleak mining town to the sounds of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys. It is the lunar New Year, 1999. Outside, the end of the millennium is celebrated in a more traditional style with exploding firecrackers and dragon dances. China’s breakneck transition from Chairman Mao’s impoverished, isolated, regimented hecatomb to a world of disco music, mobile phones, German cars, Cantonese pop, and vast individual wealth is as explosive as those firecrackers shattering the cold air of the northern plains, where Jia himself was born.”
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