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Never developing a sense of some potential to be corrupted, the relationship between Jinsheng and Tao lacks anything like pathos, with Jinsheng verging on the ridiculous in his final scenes, wearing a pasted-on moustache. . . . Where Mountains May Depart cuts cleanest and deepest, perhaps unsurprisingly, is when it's focused on Zhao Tao, Jia's partner and creative collaborator since they met during the casting of Platform.

Jia ultimately believes that China's future may be clarified through endurance, wisdom and a resilient connection with the past. Tao ultimately embodies this dynamic combination. Mountains May Depart respects many lives she's led, and the many she failed to. Despite the film's focus on yearning and separation, it expresses a belief that all aspects of Chinese life can be aligned yet again, like a perfect dance routine choreographed to the right song.

The film is a fascinating, if uneven, blend of melodrama, allegory, and elements of near-future sci-fi. It also serves as a star vehicle for the director's regular muse and wife Tao Zhao. Her magnetic performance as Tao, the film's ambitious and morally ambiguous protagonist is the film's emotional anchor.

If the later scenes feel more controlled, maybe even airless, it might be because after looking at his characters through a magnifying lens, director Jia has now begun to look through a telescope: They seem less like individuals and more like symbols. And purposefully so. Mountains May Depart may have started off as a look back, maybe even a diagnosis, but it ends as a prophecy.

[The third segment's] washed-out photography is strikingly ugly, coming after the previous episodes' restrained but deliberate use of lush colors. When I first saw the film, I wondered if Jia was referencing an awful Australian soap opera, complete with laughable English-speaking actors. But at heart I knew that this was the director's own vision of the future, and that in pursuing it, he had lost the understated acuity that made the film's first two parts emotionally devastating.

With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import.

If Jia Zhang-ke's latest feature was one of 2015's biggest disappointments, it's simply because two-thirds of it are so good, making the misjudged final chapter all the more bathetic. Because of that, it's hard to properly assess the first two sections of Mountains May Depart. You can see how much they promise, but without the context of a final successful whole, you can't be sure how far they succeed.

As easy as it is to nitpick Jia's apparent inability to direct English dialogue, there's no denying the effectiveness of the whole, which takes the standbys of melodrama—flashy suitors, tragic mothers, hometowns—and expands them into a complicated, bittersweet look at loneliness and disconnection in a world of flux.

Although Mr. Jia is obviously conversant with the European art film, he has carved out his own ways of making cinematic meaning, an approach that draws on different idioms and traditions. He occasionally folds an image into the mix that can feel enigmatic, but that over time make sense when considered in the context of the movie as a whole. A shot of an old-fashioned pagoda may not make ready sense, may even look like picture-postcard scenery, yet by the end of the movie it may make you weep.

Mountains May Depart is a steadily deflating mess, and (as widely noted) Jia does himself no favors by filming the last third in English. But I found it moving precisely because watching it reminded me that I've been watching his work for over a decade. I don't get the majority of my news from movies, but they do provide a good starting point when deciding what to read up on, and Jia's films have been consistently illuminating about what change in China looks like.

As the film expands and its characters age, that feeling of being cut adrift only intensifies. It might sound like no earth-shattering insight that money and modernity can erode relationships and a grounded sense of self, but it takes an omniscient (and omnivorous) narrator like Jia to be everywhere—close by the human reality observed in minute interactions, and against the backdrop of a world that threatens to muffle their spirit.

The forces of history tend to overwhelm the banal souls in front of the camera, who are more representative than real. Jia's last film, A Touch of Sin, solved this problem through the relative sketch-work of what played as four short, focused films. But the broader canvas of Mountains May Depart leaves his weaknesses more exposed.