A love story as simple as it is infectious, Zhang Yimou's The Road Home is likely to come as something of a shock to viewers familiar with the acclaimed Chinese director from his previous movies.
Zhang made a name for himself over the past decade with films like Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou and Red Sorghum, visually stunning works that reveled in the ornate and rigorously composed, color-coded imagery associated with China's so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers. In contrast with the lavish and seductive visuals, each of these films presented what in the final analysis must be seen as rather downbeat and even oppressive narratives, and all of them created quite a stir in China for what was perceived as their controversial and provocative political subtexts.
There's almost no subtext, political or otherwise, in The Road Home, and the tone, for the most part, is as uncomplicated and upbeat as one of those today-I-met-the-boy-I'm-gonna-marry pop songs from the earliest days of rock 'n' roll. Likewise, the film's visual approach, lovely as it is, is miles away from the geometrically precise, claustrophobic majesty of Raise the Red Lantern. What Zhang Yimou has created in The Road Home is something quite new for this most daring and demanding of filmmakers: a sweet, unaffected and unabashedly emotional ode to first love, last love and all the love in between.
The Road Home takes place in China, primarily in the late '50s, although the story is basically timeless and, with the exception of one or two relatively minor elements, could have taken place at almost any point over the last century. The film begins in the present with a brief prologue narrated by an urban businessman named Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), just returned to the rural village of his birth to handle funeral arrangements for his father, the beloved local schoolteacher. Complications immediately set in when Yusheng's grieving mother insists that, in accordance with a nearly forgotten, prerevolutionary tradtion, the body must be carried back to the village on foot — a difficult, half-day journey from the morgue that will require several dozen strong men making their way through the blinding snow and ice.
While the son considers his aged mother's stubborn request, a dusty family photograph sparks his memory, and the film proper, as our narrator begins spinning a tale that's clearly been told and retold to him, that of his parents' courtship. It's at this point that The Road Home begins its real story. Zhang films the snowbound, frozen village of the modern prologue in silvery black-and-white (a neat trick of the eye, since we're not absolutely certain we're looking at black-and-white images until the first human face appears several minutes into the movie). When the extended flashback that encompasses the film proper begins, however, The Road Home bursts into glorious color, and the snow and ice suddenly transform into a magnificent Chinese Spring of almost Disney-esque lushness.
The centerpiece in all this splendor is the 18-year-old face of the narrator's mother, Zhao Di, a sweet and (even then) stubborn beauty, filled to bursting with whatever the Chinese equivalent is of joie de vivre. Di is played, wonderfully, by Zhang Ziyi, the young actress now known widely to Western audiences for her high-flying turn in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Zhang's role in The Road Home is a 180-degree turn from her tragic-romantic, ass-kicking uber-babe in Crouching Tiger — Di is all dimpled, pigtailed, uncomplicated girlishness with a seemingly boundless affection for the handsome young schoolteacher with whom she's fallen instantly in puppy-love.
A film of great charm and emotional resonance, the bulk of The Road Home simply details the gentle and thoroughly innocent courtship of Di and the young teacher, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao). Our narrator, the couple's future son, supplies us with tidbits of information, setting the scene for the shy but determined Di's quaint machinations, as she goes about arranging a series of "chance" meetings with the equally shy Changyu. Other than that, Di's plan of seduction (really a much too explicit a word for what transpires here) consists mostly of hugely appealing smiles and the preparation of mushroom dumplings, onion cakes and other dishes favored by the teacher.
Eventually Changyu is called away to answer questions about his political affiliations (remember, this is 1958 and the storm clouds of the Cultural Revolution are gathering), leaving Di to stand by her man by patiently awaiting his return for the next two years. That's about as close to dramatic conflict as The Road Home gets, although the film gains considerable richness owing to the fact that the spot where Di awaits her future husband's return — the one road leading to and from the little village — is the very same route along which, some 40 years later, she will insist his corpse be carried to its final resting place. "So that he won't forget his way home," the widow matter-of-factly explains. Not forgetting our way home — respect for the lessons and voices of the past — is almost as crucial as love in this delicate little film.
Although Zhang Yimou hasn't been down this exact path before, The Road Home is not without precedent. Zhang's previous Not One Less, another tale of one-room schoolhouses and delightfully obstinate young girls, laid the foundation for the looser, more naturalistic and less style-conscious approach here. Zhang has gone on record professing his admiration for all those wonderfully unfussy, minimalist films currently pouring out of Iran, and that admiration shows up in spades in the appealingly unaffected performances, purity of emotion and generally no-nonsense approach of The Road Home.
At one point in the film, we even get a flash of a movie poster for Titanic hanging, against all odds, in the sparsely furnished home of Di as an old woman. Our immediate reaction is that Zhang's having a bit of fun, contrasting the spare, straightforward anti-style of his film with Hollywood's most bloated excesses. The more we consider it, though, it's just as likely that the filmmaker has gone beyond irony here and is simply noting the very human need to believe in undying romantic love. That said, there's really not that much difference between an old Chinese peasant woman and even the most wildly bombastic blockbuster.
This article appears in Jul 18-24, 2001.
