The Road Home [Wo de fu qin mu qin] **** (1999, Ziyi Zhang, Honglei Sun, Hao Zheng) – Classic Movie Review 7887

There is superb acting in Zhang Yimou’s heart-rending, exquisitely realised 1999 Chinese film The Road Home, a tale of pure and simple love that does not put a foot wrong and will have hardly a dry eye in the house.

On the sudden death of his father, a middle-aged, city businessman son Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei) returns home to the North China village of his youth, where his grieving old mother (Zhao Yuelin) has decided to follow the ancient traditions in burying the coffin, though times have changed so much.

The son recalls his parents’ love story of how they met in the Fifties, and his then beautiful young mother Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi), just 18, living with her own blind, widowed mother, falls for the village’s new teacher Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao). Their courtship is interrupted when the teacher is ordered back to the city for obscure political mistakes, and the would-be lovers are separated for two years. Then in the present, the son decides his mother’s wishes must be respected and a remarkable procession is arranged to carry the coffin many miles in snow from the hospital back to the village.

Only the treacly music tips this romantic tale over into the sentimental, otherwise it is perfectly handled. The present is in black and white and the long central flashback in colour.

Yimou says: ‘In the past artists have tended to deal with this difficult period in Chinese history in a rather serious and analytical 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 story that enables us to survive such difficult periods in our past.’

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7887

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