Where the Mountains Remain and the People Are Gone  A reflection on Mountains May Depart

When Sally Yeh's voice comes through the earphones, singing of how the weather grows cold in distant places and snow may yet fall on the road ahead, that faraway sorrow suddenly takes on a shape. I find myself thinking of the old lines: life's road forks north and south at every turn; you go your way toward Xiaoxiang, I go mine toward Qin.

The instrumental theme that runs through the film returns each time alongside a slow pan or a gradual push forward, spreading a wordless sense of drift. What stays with me most is the sequence of linear compositions after Liangzi leaves his hometown: the wire fencing of a construction site, the iron bars of the zoo enclosure, the crisscrossing partition screen inside a taxi, each one forming a cage that follows the last. When Liangzi stands face to face with the caged tiger, does he see something of himself looking back? The current of the age sweeps up everyone's ambitions and carries them off. Some are washed ashore. Some sink to the bottom.

The frame gradually widens. From the square 1.33:1 of 1999, to the 1.85:1 of 2014, then out to the expansive 2.35:1 of 2025. The form opens up, but the feeling inside it grows thinner.

I think of the dance at the beginning of the film. Neon light runs like something intoxicated. In the wide-angle lens, the crowd distorts and stretches, the edges pulling out of shape, like a feverish dream. It calls to mind Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels: the estrangement of city nights, sparks flickering on and off, people at their closest and their most distant at the very same moment. It is a collective sleepwalking. And every dream eventually breaks.

Then comes the solo dance in the snow at the end.

Tao dances in the middle of falling snow, her arms sweeping through the white curtain as though reaching into a river of time, trying to pull something back. In that moment, everything that has passed acquires weight. Every joy and sorrow, every parting in life and in death, settles at last into a silent snowfall. The act of dancing returns from something social and clamorous to something private: one person standing before time, before what has been lost, in a kind of mourning. From collective dreaming to solitary waking, from evasion to confrontation, these two dances hold twenty-six years of the world's turning between them.

Dollar, the child named for a currency, is something like a product of the era's fracturing. From Fenyang to Shanghai, then on to Australia in the southern hemisphere, he was born to drift. The complicated feeling between him and his Mandarin teacher Mia finds its way through a pair of sunglasses. When Dollar looks at Mia through the lenses, what he is searching for may not be love at all, but a belated recognition of maternal warmth lost inside an alien cultural world. The feeling is so overwhelming and so formless at the same time. Like a smooth stone touched in a dream, for one instant genuinely real in the palm of the hand, yet impossible to remember which river it came from. The key he carries from Fenyang all the way to Australia therefore becomes more than an object. It is the last thread connecting him to the land he came from.

The film is full of life's indifference to human plans: a journey to offer congratulations that turns into a funeral procession, a plane that falls from the sky without warning, a court's ruling on who gets to raise a child. These moments collide with the bright tempo of Go West and produce a kind of absurdist poetry, as though fate always chooses to play its tricks just as people lift their voices and march forward.

The symbols in this film are time capsules. A young man carrying a Chinese broadsword moves against the flow of the crowd in silence, like a classical figure arrived in the wrong era, carrying a lost spirit of chivalry and grassroots dignity, an homage with nowhere to rest inside the march of modernization. Throughout the film, Tao keeps asking whether a problem is one of algebra or geometry. Algebra suggests the force of money, the logic of capital accumulating. Geometry points to the triangle the three of them form. This is not only an emotional predicament. It is a metaphor for an entire era, the tension between the nation and the individual, between the mountains and rivers that endure and the people who do not.

Cherish looks back. Go West moves forward. When Dollar in 2025 hears Cherish in a Chinese language class, it sounds only faintly familiar. When Tao dances alone in the snow, Go West no longer belongs to any character. Together with the rough, stuttering DV footage shot at low frame rates, these songs ask what is real: is it the memory that comes back clearly, or the blurred and trembling image that still carries the dust of its time inside it?

At the end of the film, there is no reunion, no reconciliation. Only a northern snowfall, covering without a sound every road that led here and every road that leads away.

You turn around, and the mountains and rivers are still there. But the people are gone.