The Road Home - out now
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
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.
After the successful fusion of uninhibited bawdiness and showbiz satire in The 40 Year Old Virgin and pregnancy-centric rom-com Knocked Up, current chieftain of Hollywood comedy Judd Apatow looks to have scored another hit with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Once again he takes a situation that really shouldn’t be funny – in this case the break-down of a long-term relationship – and sucks from it every last drop of laughs.
Love in the Time of Cholera is based on the sumptuous, florid novel by Nobel Prize winning Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez. The film adaptation by Mike Newell, who is best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, just goes to show that the best novels rarely work well on the big screen.
A departure from the gargantuan historical epics such as Farewell my Concubine and Temptress Moon for which director Chen Kaige made his name, Together With You is an unashamedly sentimental tale of love between father and son which faces strong, raw emotions like love and ambition head-on. Warning: invest in a large box of tissues before viewing.
Italian for beginners is a touching and enduring romantic comedy set in a dreary suburb of Copenhagen. It portrays the lives of six lonely thirty-somethings looking for love and a sense of purpose who enroll in a beginners’ class in Italian run by the local council. Written and directed by Lone Scherfig (On Our Own), the film follows the guidelines of Dogma 95, the ascetic filmmaking code advanced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and others which forbids expensive and spectacular special effects in order to focus on the purity of storyline and script.
Recently, police in Japan arrested Tatsuko Horikawa, a 58-year old woman who had secretly moved into a man’s flat without him knowing; she had hidden in a cupboard and emerged during the daytime whilst the owner was at work. The 57-year-old man who owned the house became suspicious after food kept disappearing from his fridge, and so he set up a surveillance system, filming the woman as she walked around in his absence.
This Academy Award winning teen comedy drama blindsided people when it appeared, apparently from out of nowhere last year, winning over US audiences with its unconventional handling of teenage pregnancy, sharp comic dialogue, and gentle-yet-deliberate pacing.