The title, which refers to a 14th-century scroll painting, suggests a docile pastorale. But this beautiful film is actually a complicated look at China’s overwhelming changes, with one family in a formerly rural province standing in for a country contemplating its own past and future. Gu Xiaogang spent two years capturing all four seasons in the far-eastern, river-based region of Hangzhou, and he uses long, painterly tracking shots to follow the mostly quiet travails of four unlike brothers, their offspring, and their ailing matriarch.

The effect can be emotionally distant, but the film never drags, even at 150 minutes, and the cumulative effect is like watching swimmers heading doggedly toward faraway shores, each wanting to call that place “home”.