The Banquet
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Most movies these days can't honestly earn your tears. But Zhang Yimou's "The Road Home" – a great love story and a deeply moving celebration of simple lives – does.
Set in a tiny village in north China today and in the past, "The Road Home" is a stunningly beautiful film. Realized with grace, passion and full-hearted skill, it's an unforgettable portrait of the blossoming love between a pretty young 18-year-old villager, Zhao Di (played in youth by the radiant Zhang Ziyi), and a handsome 20-year-old schoolteacher, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao), as recalled by their son, Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei) more than 30 years later, just after his father has died.
This frame of the past recaptured creates an almost unbearable poignancy – and Zhang visualizes this remembrance by shooting the present scenes in bleaker, icier monochrome images and the past in a flood of warm, rich colors that bathe the screen in the rapture of first love.
In the beginning, he shows us 40-ish Yusheng, who has long since left the village and is a successful city businessman, now called back for his father's funeral. The film's present action takes place during the three days (caught in those cold, bluish-black and white shots) when he sits up with his distraught mother, the elderly Di (played in old age by Zhao Eileen), making plans to carry his father's body back to the village from the hospital.
There is a problem. Old Di is determined that her husband's body will be carried back by a procession of pallbearers and that she herself will weave the funeral cloth on her ancient loom. The mayor (played in old age by Chang Guifa and in youth by Sung Wencheng) has gently tried to dissuade her, and he tries to enlist Yusheng. The season is wintry, snow is imminent. The village, bled for years by the emigration of its young, doesn't have enough men to carry back Changyu.
Yusheng tries, but his mother is resolute. She will find the pallbearers and weave the cloth. And as Yusheng watches her firm back bent over the ancient loom, he recalls the story – familiar through all his village – of his parents' courtship.
Here is where "The Road Home" shifts to the past, where the screen suddenly blazes with color and the film begins to break your heart.
It is a simple story. Young Changyu, a graduate, comes to the village to help build a one-room schoolhouse and teach. Di, the prettiest girl in the village, who lives with her old, blind, widowed mother (Li Bin), hears him one morning reciting lessons and falls in love with the sound of his voice – and then with him. It is purely personal response; she has no interest in education. The school is built, then she cooks little dishes for the workers' picnics and hopes he will pick hers.
We watch her little ploys, his delighted responses. Then the lovers are separated by politics when Changyu is brought back to the city for a tribunal. The lovers persevere – through hardship, illness, near-tragedy. At their moment of triumph, the story returns to the present: Di's vigil, Yusheng's problem.
Though the story is simple, the emotions it arouses are deep. A number of factors contribute: the guilt of the son, the slow erosion of village life, the past political turbulence and the simple ideals of the parents. Over all of this, there is something else that movies often try to give us but rarely succeed so well: the power of love, the determination to endure.
"The Road Home" won three major awards at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival, where it was runner-up for top honors to "Magnolia," and it's both a heart-stoppingly gorgeous film and showcase for one of the most beautiful young actresses in the world today: Zhang Ziyi, who made her debut here and later played the fearsomely agile heroine of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
Zhang Yimou, who earlier made an international icon of his previous star, Gong Li, does just as much for the teenage Ziyi. But he also captures the simple wooded mountain landscapes of present and past with a poetic grandeur and clarity that most movies can't touch. Zhang is a supreme visual stylist, but in this film he outdoes himself. Inspired by modern Iranian films -- and especially those of his favorite director, Abbas Kiarostami – Zhang luminously evokes both love in the moment and love remembered.
He also wryly suggests the divide between real love and media fantasy. On the wall of the elderly Di's home are two posters for "Titanic" – which also juxtaposed views of an old woman and her young passion -- and, as almost everyone will recognize, the musical score by San Bao shamelessly evokes the bittersweet Irish airs of James Horner's "Titanic" score. The reference is slightly, but not entirely, mocking: The old woman of the "The Road Home" probably loved James Cameron's spectacular message of undying romance. But her own romance – living simply in the village with her schoolteacher husband – was undying and passionate too. By the end of the film, we realize how much.
Some audiences may unwisely forget the constant feminist themes running throughout Zhang's work ("Red Sorghum," "Raise the Red Lantern," "The Story of Qui Ju") and reject "The Road Home" as too conservative, too retrograde. They may object to Zhao Di as a heroine because she "merely" helped her husband teach generations of impoverished pupils -- who then left for the city. They may find the story small, the characters remote from experience.
But these are not small lives and not a little story -- as the film's end clearly shows. "The Road Home" ultimately celebrates a beauty and heroism around us that we often miss in both our movies and our lives.