The Chinese title of Jia Zhangke’s wonderful film, Shan He Gu Ren, is a saying that’s hard to translate. In essence, it compares unchanging, age-old landscapes with the instabilities of human lives. The film is in three chapters, representing the past (1999), the present (2014) and the near future (2025), and it focuses on exactly those things: what lasts forever, and what changes. In 1999, Tao (Jia’s muse Zhao Tao) is torn between two men who are crazy about her. Liangzi is a poor mineworker, and Zhang Jinsheng is a rising entrepreneur. She marries the rich guy, has a son … and is divorced by 2014, when Liangzi returns to their town in Shanxi, dying of the mineworker’s disease emphysema. In 2025 Tao is still alone, living on her memories, while her son has emigrated with his father to Australia and starts to feel the absence of his mother acutely. Jia uses the shifting time-frame to explore not only China’s breakneck social and economic changes but also what time does to feelings of loyalty, obligation and love. Less seriously, he also relives his own youthful passion for disco dancing to the Pet Shop Boys. (Tony RAYNS)