movie review

movie review

In this weekend I watched a Chinese film called ‘Mountains may depart’, the most impressive part about this film might not be the plot but the way of how it express emotions and its detail processing.

This clip is talking about that the main character Tao and her son will be separated after they taking off the train because Tao’s ex-husband will send their son to Australia for a new life. In this clip, Tao didn’t show her sadness by crying and any words of sorrow but playing a HongKong old song ‘take care’ to her son, just as its name, the content of the song is about the parting, which just match the plot. Thus the music is the way to express the emotion of a mother’s sadness. Moreover, Tao then gives her son a red key of their house, the red colour in China is the meaning of happy and good luck, and it represents Tao’s expectation to her son. Additionally the music and the red key can be seen as the example of the way that film expresses emotions , and I think it is a Chinese-style implicit expression (not directly showing emotions by words, facial expression or behaviour etc.), which makes me feel super impressed.

As the film is divided into three parts, which crosses three different year intervals, the film then uses three different size of frame to present the changing times — 1.33:1 to present 1999, 1.85:1 to present 2014 and 2.39:1 present 2025. The size changes seem to be undetected, however this detail makes the film more interesting and truly helps to presents the time changes.

And the film shoots in both China and Australia, to notice the changes of the location, except to distinguish the people changes or language changes, the other way to notice is very detailed, which is the brightness of the light. The light in China is very dim and has a misty feeling, however in Australia the light is super bright, I am very admired by the completion of this detail.

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