Originally popularized and coveted by the Western world, the esteemed traveler cut a formidable figure for its elites: the rationalists for their admiration of breathtaking human knowledge, and the epicureans for their worship of worldly, beautiful pleasures. Somewhere along the way, with maritime travel and industrialization settled, cosmopolitanism was born, and the world came to know itself as a smattering of communities and cultures, each inextricably linked but defiantly insular all the same. Which is why a cosmopolitan locale always invokes a paradox: in a city of travelers, who are the locals and wherein lie their ostensible travails? Viv Li’s autobiographical and semi-documentarian first feature, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest, frivolously embraces this uneasy state of being as a way of life unto itself. Set one half in Berlin, the other in Beijing, the film traverses both cities in seamless continuity, shuttling back and forth between two metropoles whose beliefs and customs are gently and beguilingly pitted against each other.
It’s not a didactic film for the most part, as Li steers clear of undercutting either her homeland or her found family, whether by trivializing their experiences or by essentializing them. Yet Two Mountains proves to be, for the most part, a lazily superficial reflection on cosmopolitanism’s joys and woes. Having left China after university to broaden her horizons and take in the sights and sounds of the globe, Li — now in her mid-30s — has tired, somewhat, of her erstwhile openness to experience. “I’m just constantly trying to be inside of communities,” she confesses to the camera in the middle of a desert retreat southeast of Berlin, where she lodges on an artist’s visa. The space around her, however, is barren and unpopulated. Her search for kinship and personal freedom outside of the communalistic hierarchies of Chinese society has led to its own form of exile and alienation, as its starting premise (that people would be as open to her as she them) never really came to be. Berlin, the city of wannabe artists and preferred pronouns, is exactly the myopic circlejerk of false intimacy and fashionable posturing illustrated in Lauren Oyler’s hyper-cynical Fake Accounts and, to a lesser extent, the Rohmerian musings of Ruan Lan-Xi’s The Plant from the Canaries.
Which is Li’s point, but all the same cut and edited down essentially to an incurious and speciously curated pastiche of carefree authenticity. Two Mountains’ images and sometimes dizzying juxtapositions do make for an electrifying watch; less alluring is the director’s faithful transcription of her so-called realities onto the screen. When she cries, or debates the merits of gender theory with more skeptical friends, or records her Chinese relatives’ plugged-in discussions on geopolitics over dinner and beer, there’s a keen sense that she is performing for the viewer. To the extent that such performance allows for the self-reflexivity necessary to reconcile one image with another, the film thrives in its myriad contradictions. But such awareness is frequently absent, swapped for a soon-trivial realization that the über-woke Germans don’t really care about Chinese culture as much as they obsess over parading their own. Having gestated since pre-COVID days and elongated into an unflinching if also brutally inane tale of two cities, Li’s film diary-cum-vlog skirts thoughtful, genuine authenticity. Its dual titular metaphors bear the weight both of familial, societal expectations and of the labors of living as a modern woman; its creator mostly shrugs in response to them. Everyone contains multitudes, and so the bar is set higher for the world-weary traveler to belabor her own.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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