In the black-and-white introduction to Chinese director Zhang Yimou'saward-winning film The Road Home, a citified businessman returns, with down parka and four-wheel drive, to the remote mountain village where he grew up. His father has just died, and he has come back to this rural, snowbound enclave to help prepare for the funeral. Devastated by her loss, his mother, Di, is determined to follow the oldest traditions by having her husband's body carried to his grave from the hospital where he died. Superstition says they must show his soul the path home one last time, so he'll never forget. But the young people have all left the village, and no one remains to haul the coffin. Perhaps they could use a tractor? the son tries to bargain with his mother, who is stubborn and won't hear of compromise. No, she insists, he must be carried--on foot. As the mother weaves a special shroud, the son sets about trying to arrange for pallbearers from the next town over.
Here he begins to tell the story of his parents' courtship some 40 yearsbefore, and the film bleeds into brilliant color. In the flashback that comprisesthe body of the movie, Di is an illiterate peasant girl who falls in love atfirst sight with the town's new schoolteacher, Luo, a young man from the city.Although all previous marriages in the village have been arranged, Di isdetermined to win him over, without help, and sets about tempting him with awhole battery of flattering quilted jackets and homemade mushroom dumplings.Like Di herself, the movie never ventures outside the village, and even whenoffscreen complication is indicated (Luo is taken off at one point forquestioning about some unspecified political matter), the film's perspectiveremains confined to the heroine's own limited, practical field of understanding.
At first glance, The Road Home (which was adapted by the writer Bao Shi from his novel Remembrance) appears to be a simple movie, little more than a pastoral, sumptuously shot love story whose most notable features are the lovely young actress Zhang Ziyi (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame), who plays Di as a teenager, and the director's bold use of color.
A bright, almost fevered scarlet has been Zhang Yimou's trademark over theyears. In films like Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and JuDou, he charged Chairman Mao's pet hue with a whole range of voluptuous meanings. Now he branches out into other, softer shades. Lime green and pale pink, as well as that same vivid crimson, figure centrally in the action and seem, as almost always in Zhang's films, to serve as the primary conveyors of feeling. And in contrast to some of his earlier, more corseted movies, TheRoad Home shows his efforts to loosen up and get lyrical--the film features a florid soundtrack and endless, adoring shots of Zhang Ziyi running, braids flying, through the open meadows--but he continues to be most comfortable (and capable) expressing himself through his palette.
Watching The Road Home, viewers may be happiest simply to sit back and take in the luscious CinemaScope landscapes. Yet the harder you look--and the more you know about Zhang Yimou's own ideas concerning economics, China, and the movies--the plainer it becomes that he doesn't mean The Road Home to be a mere pretty trifle. For Zhang, the picture is first and foremost a political statement, what he calls "a reaction against ... the logic of the market." Chinese cinema, he says, has been overly influenced by Hollywood, and a film like this one attempts to return native moviemaking to the local traditions of poetic narrative and respect for one's elders, for education, and for the past. The road home of the title, then, is not just a literal dirt path over which the dead man must be carried one last time before he's buried, but the way back to a more basic, premodern sense of what it means to be Chinese.
Putting aside for a minute the deeply retrograde potential built into thissort of nostalgia (and without asking why a sentimental, downright kitschyback-to-basics Chinese gesture has so much more appeal in the West than wouldits American equivalent), it's worth considering how Zhang's life has led him tomake such statements or, for that matter, such a film.
The foremost member of the so-called fifth generation of Chinese directors,Zhang was born in Xian in 1950 and was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution,when his schooling was abruptly halted and he was sent off to the provinces towork. As he labored on a farm and in a mill, without access to books or formalinstruction, he took still photographs on the sly.
In 1978 he applied to enter the Beijing Film Academy and, despite his obvious talents, was rejected, since, according to the official criteria, he was too oldto be a student. Determined to study film, he appealed this decision repeatedlyand finally turned to the minister of culture himself, arguing that the CulturalRevolution had caused him to waste 10 years of his life. He was soon admitted tostudy cinematography and made his directorial debut in 1987, with RedSorghum, after which he went on to make a string of internationally acclaimed films, most of them costume dramas starring his then-mistress Gong Li, and many of them banned or suppressed at home.
Informing these pictures was a sensibility that seemed fiercely critical ofcertain aspects of Chinese society, though it was always hard for Western viewersto know just how allegorical Zhang meant for his films to be. Were the cruel,feudal settings of, say, Ju Dou--about a beautiful young woman sold to a wealthy, impotent ogre of a dye factory owner--meant to symbolize a cruel, Communist present, or did Zhang intend for his heroine's oppression at the hands of her tyrannical husband to stand as testimony to just how far China had come since the years of concubines and bound feet? When Zhang commented on the dutiful enslavement of the title character in Ju Dou, he chalked up the slow nature of her rebellion to "thousands of years of Confucian education"--a remark that might also imply a critique of contemporary China, still mired in its own repressive past.
And there was the question of intended audience: Was a film such as JuDou aimed at Chinese minds and hearts or was it designed to win art house crowds abroad? The English writer Gilbert Adair has commented on the "highly exportable chinoiserie ... of their [Zhang and his contemporaries'] films ... [and] the delectable whiff of nostalgico-colonialism they emit." That may sound harsh, though anyone who has seen a luxuriously stifling spectacle like Raisethe Red Lantern will know what he means.
With The Road Home, however, Zhang changes his tack. The critical edge has faded away and been replaced by a fawning, almost toothless yearning for the good old days before the Cultural Revolution. (His criticism of Hollywood is not stated directly, though in one of the early, present-day scenes, a Chinese-language poster for Titanic glares incongruously off the wall of a village hut.) Zhang has explained his new film as a companion piece to his previous picture, Not One Less, a modest, naturalistically shot parable made with nonprofessional actors, about a 13-year-old girl left in charge of an impoverished rural school. Both movies focus on the place of learning in Chinese society and both belong to what might be called the warm-and-fuzzy period of Zhang's career, though The Road Home looks backward as it also takes the present into account.
According to Zhang, this new film is an attempt to examine how "Chinese peoplehave reacted to 'learning' at two particular moments in our modern history. Thefirst of these," he goes on, "was several decades ago. For purely politicalreasons, learning was cruelly devalued. Intellectuals suffered physical abuse andwere made to 'disappear.' The second of these is today. Everyone now understandsthe principle that knowledge equals power, and yet so many of us areultra-materialistic and obsessed with money. Learning is once again beingdevalued."
Fair enough. As someone who sacrificed a whole chunk of his life to theCultural Revolution, Zhang surely knows what he's talking about. But watchingThe Road Home, you may wonder at the rosy, reactionary nature of his tribute to tradition. There's no skeptical commentary implied here, and Di seems quite satisfied with her illiterate lot in life. When her man is taken off for questioning, she scrambles to sweep and scrub his schoolhouse, preparing to welcome him when he returns. Her relationship to education is one of respectful subservience. She isn't educated but she honors those, like her husband-to-be, who are.
Zhang clearly sees Di as a pillar of feminine strength and tenacity, a womanat peace with her place in the kitchen. Once she sets her sights on theschoolteacher, she knows what she wants, and most of the film centers on hergently comic attempts to win him for a husband. The flush-cheeked, resilientpeasant woman (or girl) is a recurring figure in Zhang's films, though thisparticular incarnation may strike some viewers as more than a touch idealized andcloying. Even Di's stupidity is romanticized: When the teacher is due to comeback to the village, she waits for hours by the roadside, in the snow, and makesherself literally lovesick. And as soon as he returns, she blooms back intoperfect health.
The teeth begin to ache, it's all so sugary. Then again, Zhang Ziyi is indeedradiant, in an almost presexual way. (Her face is what transfixes: The lithedancer's body that director Ang Lee used to such stunning effect in CrouchingTiger is buried underneath her baggy clothes.) If you're willing to buy the precious outlines of the director's wishful idyll, you should have an easy time absorbing his G-rated fantasy of his heroine as paragon and wood nymph.