Review of Buddha Mountain / 观音山, directed by Li Yu

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Because I was on such a limited income during this time, I was really relying on my local library for entertainment. If I had nothing to do, or no blog or freelance work to continue on, I might have actually gone insane. I genuinely cannot imagine what retirement might be like down the road if I have nothing to do.

Anyways, I was going to my local library once a week to pick up movies (in DVD form) and a stack of books to get me through the week. Between this and my advance copy collection, I genuinely got through quite a bit during this time. I was truly on a roll until I had a small depression period over the lack of job.

All of that aside, my local library also provides the streaming service Kanopy, which literally, as this moment, has over seven hundred movies I want to watch. I know for a fact I will never watch all of these movies during my lifetime, but because I have this free time, I made it my mission to whittle down my watch list to a somewhat decent number—maybe like 500.

I ended up watching Buddha Mountain and picking it from my to-watch list on a whim. I think I was scrolling through at the time, saw Fan Bingbing’s face, and decided to go for it. I’ve never actually seen a movie with her in it, and I was thinking of that fact when I decided to press play.

I’ve also been really meaning to watch more Chinese cinema lately, so this was the perfect opportunity to sit down and actually watch a movie from the mainland. I haven’t been invested in Chinese cinema since I took an honors course on it in college, so now’s my moment to shine and flourish in this realm of expertise.

Let’s get into the review! This is a fun movie, that’s for sure.

When a retired opera singer invites three troubled teenagers into her home, it opens up completely new problems for her.

There are four main characters in this movie, all of whom come together to create the story and themes that the film dwells on. There are four friends Nan Feng, Fatso, and Ding Bo, who are what society most likely would dub as delinquents. When Nan Feng is singing at a pub, she manages to cause problems when she swings a speaker around, as she hits a man with it right where it hurts the most.

This leads to a confrontation between her and the pub’s owner, then her and the three friends go to a roadside spot to eat, drink, and complain about the circumstances that led them there. The very next day Nan Feng gets into another fight when Fatso is bullied, and smashes a bottle and makes another girl kiss her in a fit of rage.

We also meet Teacher Chang, who still teaches with the opera she once worked at to keep herself busy during the day. As the trio continues to drift through life, they end up living with Teacher Chang, whose habits they don’t like, such as waking up early and singing opera in the house. She also is very particular about her cleaning habits, which they don’t respect at all.

Teacher Chang is very much grieving at this point in the story, as she lost her son not too long before the movie began. It’s implied that there was a car accident early on, as she keeps going to the destroyed car and reminiscing over what happened. The rowdy trio spots her going to the car one day and steals it once she leaves. They also steal money from her and replace it with fake money, which is another new level of terrible.

We learn later that her son did indeed die in a car accident, and he was with his girlfriend at the time. She survived the accident. As the trio continues their joy ride in the car, they come across a building destroyed in an earthquake, and a monk takes a picture of them standing amid the ruins of a temple.

More drama ensues when Nan Feng spots Ding Bo kissing a girl that’s not her, and she goes back to the apartment and seeks out Teacher Chang for some kind words and advice. The next day, the trio and Teacher Chang decide to go back to the destroyed temple and help the monk repair what survived. The monk tells him that his master’s body is the real temple.

Teacher Chang finds inner peace seeing the trio doing something good, and decides that she has done everything she could. When Nan Feng looks away for a minute, she misses Teacher Chang leaving them behind, and they think she jumped off of the cliff in order to reunite with her family in the afterlife.

Some time passes, and the trio, with Nan Feng and Ding Bo now together romantically, go home. They come to terms with the end of their youth. The movie then ends with Teacher Chang’s advice to Nan Feng, as she told her about the importance of being together with their loved ones.

Overall Thoughts

Although this movie has some definite flaws and a little bit of a pacing issue (or at least to me), I think the themes that emerge in this one are interesting. It was released in 2010 and depicts these youths at an unruly time of their lives, then has them coming to terms that they need to change by the end of the movie.

That’s a take that was interesting to me with China during this period, especially if you’re used to the sanitized Chinese drama way of seeing things. I find the hyperrealism of a lot of Chinese filmmakers to be a critical lens on the way contemporary Chinese society is going, and this film is another entry to this unique tradition of storytelling that’s emerging.

Anyways: it’s not my favorite movie in the world, but I do definitely appreciate this film and what it’s trying to say. Teacher Chang is the most interesting character to me, but I did enjoy the performances by all of the actors and thought they did a great job with the script.

Go watch this one if you can find it and are interested! If you haven’t seen it—movies are meant to be seen, not read about on the Internet.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.