The Banquet
The Road Home (Wo de fu qin mu qin) - 1999 For her first major film, Zhang Ziyi was selected from thousands of applicants to play Zhao Di, a young girl who falls in love with the new teacher who has come to her town in rural China. Director Zhang Yimou uses only the barest means to create a work of perfect poetic beauty.
Reviews and Articles
Chicago Tribune Review - 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. Though the story is simple, the emotions it arouses are deep... It's both a heart-stoppingly gorgeous film and showcase for one of the most beautiful young actresses in the world cinema today: Zhang Ziyi. Director Zhang Yimou captures the simple wooded mountain landscapes of present and past with a poetic grandeur and clarity most movies can't touch. Zhang is a supreme visual stylist, but in this film he outdoes himself, luminously evoking both love in the moment and love remembered. These are not small lives and this is 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.
Senses of Cinema Review - What we find in The Road Home is perfectly crafted story-telling of irresistible charm. Zhang Yimou sees this work a reaction to vulgarity and a return to a Chinese tradition: the poetic narrative. The magic for this commentator is distilled in the mother’s statement: "I cannot read but for forty years I would walk to the school and I would stand outside to hear his voice reading". Cinematically it may be innocent but dramatically it is undeniably affecting.
Director's Statement
This is a film about love, about family and about the love between the members of a family. A simple village girl falls in love with a primary-school teacher, and their love story unfolds during a particularly difficult period in China's modern history. 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.
Links
Official Site
Amazon
Video Clips
Zhang Ziyi's most endearing movie, this trailer only scratches the surface of the beauty this film has to offer.
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Audio Clips
From San Bao's soundtrack.
Time Goes By
Tear Drops
Encounter
Leaving the Village
The Road Home
Pictures
See the ZIMS gallery at ZiyiFilms