Gay Today: Viewpoint

The Road Home

Film Review by John Demetry

The Road Home takes us back to the freedom of falling in love. It feels like a homecoming.

Director Zhang Yimou focuses on the intimacies of a courtship and of a mother-son relationship. Though remaining fixed on the personal and on a distinct community, he expands the story through a thrilling pop maneuver. Yimou finally sinks James Cameron's opus moronicus Titanic.

Zhang Ziyi plays Zhao Di in Zhang Yimou's The Road Home

Yimou places a Titanic poster in the room of an elderly woman (Yuelin Zhao), grieving the recent death of her husband, the teacher in a small village. Yimou respects the sentiments that Titanic cheapens as movie kicks.

Also, borrowing the use of flashback from Titanic, Yimou examines the time between and the space outside massive social change (pre- and post-Revolutionary China in the flashback, the Cultural Revolution and Capitalist/Imperialist China in the present-set bookends).

The teacher's lesson heard emanating from the schoolhouse initiates the critique of Titanic and of China: "Know the present, know the past." In other words: "Know your heart." Pretty radical concepts in the era of "Titanic" - global culture enamoured with its own annihilation.

The film begins in the present with Yuelin's son, played by Honglei Sun, driving on the snowy road home. Honglei's voiceover narration reveals that his father's death marks the end of a many years' absence. Gradually, we understand that Honglei's own personal disappointments with love and career made him wary of confronting his parents - and himself.

Honglei displays a disconcerting emotional distance when he learns that his father died in a blizzard on the way home from raising money to build a new schoolhouse for the town. Perhaps he finds his father's noble death a final disheartening challenge to live up to his father's noble life. Or, maybe, he resigns to the apparent futility of his father's death and life.

Titanic must speak to the son as well as his mother. As a friend describes Titanic: "The present condescending to the past." Honglei tries to deter his mother from the traditional nature of her grieving. He offers alternatives to her costly wish for the townspeople to carry her husband's body to its burial on the road home.

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In myth, this ritual gives the spirit directions to find its way back home. A tradition, Honglei explains in his voiceover, unpracticed since the Cultural Revolution. When she wants to personally weave a throw for his casket, Honglei says he'll buy one.

The chilly black-and-white photography and the self-involved voiceover distance us from Honglei and from the present. That's what makes the conflict with his mother so heartbreaking and recognizable.

While Yuelin weaves the throw in the background, Honglei picks up an old picture of his father and mother. Weaving the black-and-white photograph with the splendiferous colors of the flashback, Yimou transforms Honglei's opaque confessional voiceover into a retelling of the folk legend about his parents' courtship. Love at first sight conjures color in The Road Home.

The colorful images, with sunlight laid upon them like a throw, complement the brilliance of their love. "It's too simple," I heard some crotchety old hag complain after the movie; no doubt, anything less subtle would have knocked her on her ass. Which I was about to do - until I heard a young woman say to her date about Ziyi Zhang, who plays the mother in the flashback: "Her eyes were so expressive."

Unable to touch due to propriety and circumstance, Ziyi and Hao Zheng, as the young teacher, long to look at each other and, when they do, look longingly. The resulting situations are often humorous and touching, but when we remember the events of the present, they become emotionally ravishing.

Ziyi, recognized as the most beautiful girl in the town, receives Hao's first visit to her home framed by a doorway against a shadowed backdrop. Honglei repeats his father's description of her: "She looked like a figure in a painting."

Director Zhang Yimou (left)

Yimou achieves the same affect when Ziyi and Hao pass each other on the road where she follows him everyday after school. The panning close-ups turn the lush background into a blur while their faces remain clear - stolen moments to savor. Looking at him looking at her suddenly transforms Hao into the most beautiful man in movies -- a real "King of the world."

The world, however, as in most legends and movies, works against them. Class differences and the institutional mechanisms that sustain them, such as arranged marriages, force Hao to leave the village. Waiting for his return, Ziyi concentrates her tendency for sentimentalizing into near-fatal obsession. This echoes Yuelin's present-day insistence on a traditional funeral rite for her late husband. Initially, her son's concern seems valid; she might be nuts after all.

However, in the luminous tableau of Ziyi's red paper cutouts decorating the windows of the abandoned schoolhouse, Yimou's delicate patterns of color and sunlight liken Ziyi's love with artistic vision. Then, with Ziyi near-death from waiting for Hao in the snow, Yimou bears witness to her faith in love.

Returning to the present, Yimou replaces the thrill-seeking nihilism of Titanic with sentiment-liberating vision. Honglei's voice echoes through the town with the lessons of his father: "Know your present; know your past." The Road Home tells the story of a son finding his father's voice and his mother's love in himself.