The Road Home - out now
Lyrical and expressive, The Road Home represents a significant shift from more analytical and politically charged films concerning the period of Chinese history which preceded the Cultural Revolution. Dealing with the relationship between city and country, old and new, the film portrays love pursued in youth and fiercely remembered in old age. It is a tale of constancy and devotion against the odds in which the past represents the stability of family values and village customs; political tension is also hinted at, and occasionally bubbles to the surface. The present, on the other hand, is cold and uncertain. The young have moved away from the villages, and the old traditions are dying out. Traditional skills perfected over a lifetime are rejected for commercialism. The adage ”Know the past, know the present” resonates with inreasing sentiment as it is repeated throughout the film.
Zhang Yimou, who also directed Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and The Story of Qiu Ju, was formerly a cinematographer, and he is adept at stirring up emotions with his mastery of colour and mood. He possesses an intense awareness of the natural world, revealing in his camerawork the glory of the changing seasons, the weather and the gorgeous landscape of towering mountains, crisp snow and lush, golden fields. San Bao’s impassioned soundtrack, reminiscent of James Horner’s theme music for Titanic, represents a full-blooded escape from the political heavy-handedness that dogged Zhang’s earlier Mao-era features, lending this elemental love story an emotional grandeur.
The story is narrated by Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), a young engineer who, upon the sudden death of his father, returns from the city to the village of Sanhuetun, where he grew up. His elderly mother is consumed with grief and insists on a traditional burial following village customs. She also wants the villagers to carry her husband’s coffin the considerable distance from the hospital to the village. Yusheng’s offers of payment are rejected by the villagers, revealing the differing attitudes of old and new China – Yusheng and his contemporaries expect everything to come at a price, whereas his mother’s generation give of themselves willingly for the good of the community.
As Yusheng contemplates his father’s death he remembers the stories of his parents’ courtship, when his mother Zhao Di, played by the enchanting Zhang Ziyi, fell in love with the visiting school teacher from the city, (Zheng Hao). Di, the prettiest girl in the village who has been resisting a customary arranged marriage, is love-struck, her wide-eyed innocence only thinly disguising a stubborn, fixated passion. Too shy to approach him, yet too infatuated to withdraw, Di watches the schoolteacher from every vantage point – the forest, the well, behind the school fence. When the couple eventually marry - after two years apart due to a political “mistake” - this pattern continues, with Di visiting the school daily, listening, enthralled, to her husband’s dulcet tones.
The Road Home, and the village life it portrays, deliberately eschews the ideological wars waging in distant capitals, though their reverberations can be felt. Rather it is the simple love story that carries the film, unfolding so beautifully in a series of separate, restrained moments: A cheap hairclip, for example, which becomes the love token that will see the couple through two years of separation, and the tableau of mother and son, quietly sobbing. These subdued instances perfectly counterbalance the irrepressible passion burning in the hearts of the two main characters, and radiating through the seasons of their love in full technicolour.
