Zhang Yimou’s The Road
Home , from a screenplay by Bao Shi, based on his novel Remembrance , is quite simply the best and most emotionally engaging
film I have seen this year. It has a seemingly naïve idealism and virtue in a
cinematic cosmos drenched with “neo-noir” cynicism and brutality. In some ways,
The Road Home reminds me of a time
when Hollywood specialized in heroic biographies of even the humblest and least
charismatic benefactors of humankind, much to the disdain of supposedly
sophisticated intellectuals. But The Road
Home is perhaps more aptly compared with the more memorable memory films of
John Ford, which is to say that The Road
Home is a beautifully resonant work of art.
A measure of Mr. Yimou’s artistic ambition is his chromatic
division of the narrative between a black-and-white present and a brightly
colored past. The black-and-white section of the film begins in contemporary
China with the return of a city businessman, Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), to his
native village after the sudden death of his father. His elderly mother, Zhao
Di (Zhao Yuelin), flatly rejects her son’s suggestion that the coffin be
transported by tractor from the distant hospital where he died to his family’s
burial site, located outside the local school where he taught for many years.
Men must bear the coffin. Zhao Di also insists that Luo bring her the family’s
decrepit loom so that she can weave a funeral cloth for her husband. The image
of the old woman laboriously weaving the funeral cloth sets the stage for
parallel shots of Zhao Di at 18 (played by Zhang Ziyi) working at the same loom
in a chaste but madly passionate pursuit of Luo’s father, Luo Changyu (Zheng
Hao), the village teacher.
The lyrical and
color-inflamed past of Luo’s parents unfolds only after Luo can confer with the
village elders on the difficult task of hiring enough men to carry the coffin
over 10 miles of snowy terrain-known by custom as “the road home”-so that his
father will find his home in the next world. Sanhetun, the village in North
China where Luo was born, is later seen in all its spring glory when the young
Zhao Di catches a glimpse of her future husband and loses her heart forever.
But the courtship is far from easy. Changyu, as an educated
teacher, belongs to a higher class than Zhao Di, and China is still governed by
the rules of arranged marriages. To complicate matters further, Changyu is
taken away by the agents of the Cultural Revolution and returned to the city
for political reeducation. Zhao Di waits for what seems to be an eternity for
his return and then, feverish from the cold, sets out for the city to find him.
We know, of course, that everything will end happily for the two lovers as far
as the consummation of their passion is concerned. But the bare bones of the
plot and the incidental historical and sociological details do not begin to
convey the extraordinary sensuousness of a young girl consumed kinetically by
love.
Rumor has it that Zhang Ziyi, the young lead in The Road Home and one of the co-stars in
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , has
replaced the glorious Gong Li in Mr. Yimou’s affections. I can believe this
after watching how the middle portions of The
Road Home have been framed and edited so as to make Zhang Ziyi’s character
the point-of-view determinant, no matter how limiting her vantage point may be
in processing information about the man she loves. Her future husband’s point
of view, unlike hers, is never central to the narrative. When he disappears
into the city, he ceases to exist as a presence except for the sorrow on her
face. In the long history of the cinema around the world, there have been many
love letters written on the screen from directors to their actress-mistresses,
real and vicarious. But seldom if ever before has a love affair been wrapped
inside the rhetoric of a social document.
Hence Zhang Yimou’s published statement about what The Road Home is really about: “This is
a film about love, about family and about the love between the members of a
family …. In the past, artists have tended to deal with this period in a rather
serious and analytic way, but I prefer to use more poetic and romantic methods
to tell this pure and simple love story. It was just this kind of true love which
enabled us to survive such difficult periods in our past. In the film, the
elements of history and present-day reality are both grounded in the notion of
study. At the same time, the story shows the attitude of country people towards
learning-essentially, an attitude of respect and veneration. All of this brings
to mind the ways that Chinese people have reacted to ‘learning’ at two
particular moments in our modern history. The first of these was several
decades ago. For purely political reasons, learning was cruelly devalued.
Intellectuals suffered physical abuse and were made to ‘disappear.’ The second
of these is today. Everyone now understands the principle that knowledge equals
power, and yet so many of us are ultra-materialistic and obsessed with money.
Learning is once again being devalued. I want to use this film to take a fresh
look at these fundamental issues in Chinese society and history.”
The last thing I want to do is charge Mr. Yimou with bad
faith. Yet his statement seems derived from the platitudinous press conferences
at film festivals, where every film is reduced to a politically correct sermon.
To be sure, Mr. Yimou’s film generates a powerful feeling of vindication for
the dead teacher when dozens of his former students materialize from nowhere to
carry his coffin to its final resting place. But we have seen very little of
what he has done as a teacher in his lifetime. The heart and emotional core of
the film rest in the love story recorded almost entirely on the ever-yearning
expressions of the romantic heroine, a Juliet whose Romeo is seen mostly from
afar. There is a metaphysical gravity, nonetheless, to the demonstration that
the young grow old and die-in this instance, after a life well-lived and
dedicated, at the end as in the beginning, to the common good. Still, Zhang
Ziyi is a knockout, though I doubt she will ever be capable of Gong Li’s
stoical complexity.
He Pays but She Rules
Wayne Wang’s The
Center of the World , from a screenplay by Ellen Benjamin Wong, based on a
story by Mr. Wang, Miranda July, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, belongs to a
subgenre of the soft-core sex film in which the male calls all the shots and
the female is either willingly or unwillingly subjugated. Mr. Wang and his
several writing collaborators have pulled a major switch here by resisting the
sentimental temptation to redeem and purify a prostitute and her long-term john
in the happy and profitable manner of Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), with Julia Roberts as a Cinderella from the
gutter and Richard Gere as the Prince from the executive suite. The Center of the World is something
else again, though it begins in the traditional way with Peter Sarsgaard’s
Richard Longman, a well-heeled computer whiz, picking up Molly Parker’s
Florence, a nightclub stripper, and offering her a week’s well-paid “vacation”
in a plush Vegas hotel. She imposes peculiarly restrictive ground rules:
separate rooms, no penetration and no kissing on the lips. Richard readily
agrees, and Florence embarks on a tantalizing program of intermediate
titillation.
From the outset, Richard is a less interesting character
than Florence: He spends his spare time obsessively playing video games that
reflect his more boring, cut-throat business activities, which have made him
financially successful but have left him emotionally immature. Florence does
not have to go so far as to become Richard’s dominatrix, but she leaves no
doubt about which of them is in charge of the nighttime activities that begin
and end at the same hours every night. All his life, Richard has been terrified
of making a commitment to a woman, and now, in a strange way, a commitment is
being imposed upon him: He must be ready every night for Florence’s skillful
caresses. The cumulative effect of this enforced discipline is to make him
think that he has fallen in love with Florence and is prepared to settle down
with her.
But here comes the switch: She will have none of it. As she
patiently explains to Richard, since he has paid for her services, she is a
whore, and that’s all she wants to be. It is the way of the world for Richard
to have money and for Florence to need it, and her job is to build up his
desires until her artful final surrender, when she permits him to kiss her lips
and penetrate her. It is all part of Florence’s erotic extravaganza, and there
is no extra charge. Richard is bereft for a time, but he finally reconciles
himself to his role and hers and wants everything to continue on the same
terms.
Ms. Parker gives a remarkable performance on all cylinders,
and her character emerges as neither a tease nor a slut, but as a curiously
rational and self-possessed creature of her time and place. She can always draw
the line between what she will do and what she will not-yet a brief interlude
with Jerri (Carla Gugino), a Vegas-showgirl friend, suggests that Florence is
not entirely a stranger to same-sex hanky-panky. But the most stunning scene of
all is one in which Florence starts out with absolutely no makeup and proceeds,
in one take, to transform herself from an unadorned female to a professional
temptress. It is one of the most striking demonstrations I have ever seen on
the screen of sex as theater.
