CANNES (FRANCE) - A China trading its soul away and a futuristic Australia feature in the latest movie by gently subversive director Jia Zhang-Ke, "Mountains May Depart", premiering Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival.
(From L) Actors Zhang Yi, Zhao Tao, Chang Sylvia, Dong Zijang and Liang Jingdong pose during a photocall for the film "Mountains May Depart" at the Cannes Film Festival, on May 20, 2015
The film, which tackles the big themes of family roots, love and cultural identity, unfurls in three parts spanning 25 years of one woman's life.
From the very start of the first part, the movie captures the capitalist zeal of Chinese bedazzled in the late 1990s by their sudden new wealth and opening to the outside world, with the protagonist, Tao, dancing to the Pet Shop Boys' hit "Go West".
Swayed by a nouveau-riche suitor, she spurns her poor-but-honest love in a tragic but inevitable mistake.
The second part, set in modern-day China, shows the consequences, as the characters grapple with a fading sense of self, tradition and family in a changed world.
The third part -- blemished by amateur acting and jarringly stilted dialogue -- portrays the main character's son living in an ultra-modern Australia in 2025 with his dissolute father and feeling the loss of his Chinese identity.
Cannes audiences were expecting big things from "Mountains May Depart" after Jia won the festival's screenwriting prize in 2013 for his unflinching look at China, "A Touch of Sin".
Reviews for his latest movie have been largely positive, with critics hailing his ambition and especially the performance from his lead actress -- and wife -- Zhao Tao.
- 'Awkward' Australia scenes -
But the shortcomings of the final part of the movie were proving a handicap. Cinema industry magazine Variety called the final act in a futuristic Australia "awkward" and "the weakest in the film".
Jia explained in a media conference on Wednesday that the movie in part poses the question upwardly mobile Chinese have been grappling with over the past couple of decades: "What is money? Does money improve our lives? Or on the contrary, does money destroy part of our lives?"
In a separate interview with AFP, the director explained that he took the final part of the movie into the future because "it gives me a vantage point from which to look at our past, to determine whether what we did was right, whether we are behaving as we should".
For the son to end up in Australia, no longer able to speak in Chinese and cut off from his mother, "you wonder whether it's still possible for somebody like that to return to their roots," he said.
"That's the question that the film asks."