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Director Zhang Yimou started his film career as a cinematographer
and that experience shows in the films he has directed, including such visually stunning
works as Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. More recently, Not One Less earned
the admiration of many for the skill of its storytelling and the wisdom of its insight. The
Road Home continues Zhang's extraordinary record of accomplishment, telling a simple
story that is grounded in a universal humanity and telling it with superb visual artistry.
Bao Shi's screenplay, based on his novel, Remembrance, begins
with Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei) returning from the city to the mountain village where he
grew up. His father has died; his aged mother, Zhao Di (ZhaoYuelin), is stubbornly
insisting that the coffin carrying her late husband be carried from the health center back
to their town by pallbearers on foot--"so he won't forget the way home," she
explains.
From this initial segment of the film (in black-and-white and in the
midst of a blizzard), Yusheng relates in flashback the story of his parents' courtship,
depicted in the center segment in brilliant color. His father, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao),
came to the town forty years before to be the teacher in the village school. His mother, a
young peasant girl, living with her blind, widowed mother, broke with custom in falling in
love with the teacher. Arranged marriages were still the rule; romantic love ran counter
to that custom and their different caste/class status was yet another impediment to the
match.
But Zhao Di, played as a girl by Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is
smitten. As the school is being built, she joins other women of the town in providing
lunch to the workers, hoping that the Changyu would choose the bowl of food she brought,
on which she had lavished special care. She runs about the countryside, seeking a glimpse
of him walking with his students and exchanging glances with him--the gentlest flirtation.
When it is her family's turn to host the teacher for dinner, the real connection is made.
But Changyu is suddenly called back to the city and Zhao is disconsolate. It is over two
years before they are reunited, not to be separated again until Changyu's sudden death.
While focusing closely on the love story, Zhang is commenting on a
way of life--rural, community-based, tradition-directed--contrasted by implication with
Yusheng's city ways. Yusheng has been away for some time; as he relates his parents'
history, his mother's demands for his father's remains seem more and more reasonable--both
to him and to us. It's not only about enduring love and loyalty, it's about custom and
family and clan and change. The old skills--weaving at a loom, repairing broken
pottery--are passing and so, too, are ways of life changing. Without belaboring his point,
Zhang suggests that much of value will be lost.
Zhang sets his story in the beauty of the geographical setting, the
seasons changing in counterpoint with the development of the narrative. The mountain
valley at dusk with fields of grain waving in a gentle wind become a painterly
abstraction. Young and radiant Zhao in her red jacket running through the shimmery, golden
landscape or through the cool blue-green-white palette of a birch forest--with exquisite
deliberation Zhang composes each frame and the frame-to-frame movement and continuity with
impeccable mastery. There are subtle moments of slow motion, an occasional jump-cut, an
occasional repetition. He lavishes the camera on Zhang Ziyi's beautiful face, repeatedly
bringing it in to closeup on the wide Cinemascope screen, reveling in the transparency and
directness of her performance.
Zhang's visual and dramatic poetry are enhanced by a lush soundtrack,
used judiciously. More important than the music, though, is the sound of the school
children reciting their lessons which is heard repeatedly through the film. The education
of the next generation is important to this town; they work hard to build and sustain
their school, to support their teacher. What the children chant is what they are learning
and will carry forward to the next generation.
