Hannes Holm

Films of Hannes Holm:

• A Man Called Ove - Hannes Holm (2015)

“A Man Called Ove” - Hannes Holm (2015)

A Man Called Ove (En Man Som Heter Ove, 2015) is a Swedish comedy-drama that has achieved great popularity despite its main character being an incorrigible sourpuss [1].  Written and directed by Hannes Holm and based closely on the 2012 best-selling novel of the same name by Fredrik Backman, the film was recently nominated for a US Academy of Awards Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.  

The title character (played by Rolf Lassgård) is an embittered 59-year-old man who has recently lost his dear wife due to cancer.  At the beginning of the film he is forcibly “retired” from his job at the railroad, where he had worked for 43 years.  The new, still wet behind the ears, railroad managers inform Ove that modern techniques of “digitization” have made his job redundant.  Now his only activities in life are

• his daily visits to his wife’s grave, where he holds one-sided conversations with his departed beloved and
• his fussy enforcement of his gated-community residents association’s detailed, and largely ignored, rules. 

We see clearly early on that Ove is a curmudgeon of the first order.  He barks at everyone he meets and dismisses them all as “idiots”.  Since there is nothing pleasurable for him in this world, he promises to his wife at her tombstone that he will be soon joining her in the afterlife.  He intends to commit suicide. 

There follows a series of carefully prepared for but ultimately interrupted suicide attempts.  In each case the suicide is aborted by some interruption that evokes Ove’s punctilious sense of duty – even though he is in the process of leaving this world, he still feels obligated to attend to some detail in the here and now [2].  Also, during several of these suicide attempts, Ove lapses into a recollection of his past that reveals to the viewer a more humane, earlier version of himself.  So  the suicide motif serves two functions in this story – as a comedic instrument and as a narrative trigger mechanism for revelations about Ove’s past.

Ove’s first suicide attempt involves hanging himself with a rope tied to a hook in the ceiling. But this is interrupted when he looks out his window and sees new neighbors backing a trailer truck along the community sidewalk, a clear violation of resident association rules.  He stomps  outside and meets the new family, which consists of a pregnant Iranian lady, Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), along with her klutzy Swedish husband and their two young daughters.  Parvaneh is vivacious and highly sociable, the very opposite of the taciturn and eternally resentful Ove, and she becomes a key counterbalance to his doleful personage in this story.

During Ove’s second suicide attempt, again by hanging from the ceiling hook, Ove lapses into a memory of his childhood.  His mother died when he was a small boy, and he lived alone with his taciturn and reclusive father, who worked for the railway and who preferred tending to machines than spending time with   people.  While Ove was still a teenager (played by Filip Berg), his father was run over and killed by a railway car leaving him alone in the world.  But his father’s ways left their mark on Ove. Machines were reliable, his father always claimed, and they did what was expected of them if they were properly maintained.  This apparently became Ove’s credo, too, and he developed a mechanical view of the way the world works – everything and everyone should operate according to well-defined and mechanical rules.  There was no accommodation in his scheme of things for human caprice, the kind of thing embodied by Parvaneh.  In fact these two opposing perspectives – Ove’s mechanical rule-based way versus Parvaneh’s vivacious human-involvement way – turn out to be the central theme of this tale.

But returning to the present, Ove’s second suicide attempt comes to naught when his rope breaks.  This leads Ove to complain bitterly to the saleslady at the store from which he had purchased the rope that the rope had not been made properly.

The next suicide attempt involves carbon monoxide poisoning in a closed garage, and its occasion launches Ove into another flashback when, as a young man, his family house was condemned by officious governmental “white shirts”, who claimed his house didsn’t meet official standards.  These “white shirts” point to a secondary and  underlying subtheme in the film, an issue that likely comes up more often in countries like Sweden where the government makes a substantial commitment to social welfare.  While that commitment is undoubtedly good, there may be associated intrusive governmental activities implemented that are intended to ensure that the desired social welfare is achieved.  And in this connection there can arise exploitative people who use the government to coercively interfere with ordinary people’s live in order to siphon off public funds for their own profit.  These are the kind of people called “white shirts” by Ove, and we see a few such people in this story.

Continuing with this flashback, a neighbor’s house goes up in flames, and Ove, responding to his innate sense of duty, charges into the inferno and rescues two people.  But his own house, due probably to the complicity of some “white shirts”, burns down, too.  So, now without a home, Ove took to sleeping in empty railway cars, and one time when he overslept led to his meeting the beautiful woman, Sonja (Ida Engvoll), who would eventually become his wife.  Sonja is charming and outgoing, and she practically has to seduce the shy, introverted Ove, herself, in order to stop him from lecturing her about how machines work and get him to propose to her.  Why such a beautiful woman would be attracted to such a nerd as Ove is rather puzzling, but maybe that’s how things work in Sweden.

Returning to the present again, this suicide attempt is interrupted when Parvaneh bangs on the garage door and asks Ove for some driving lessons.  Ove’s sense of duty obligates him to help her.  While driving with her, he tells her about his long, and perhaps only, adult friendship with a similarly mechanically-oriented man named Rune, who teamed up with him in the running of  the residents association.  But there friendship was ruined, because Rune’s preference for Volvo motorcars conflicted with Ove’s preference for Saabs.  This is another comic element that would probably mostly strike a chord with Swedish viewers.

There are still more suicide attempts that come, though.  On one occasion Ove intends to throw  himself in front of an onrushing train.  But this attempt is interrupted when he sees a man faint  and fall onto the tracks; Ove’s sense of duty takes over, and he has to rescue the man.  On another occasion he is about to blow his head off with a shotgun.  But this is interrupted by a local teenage boy who has been thrown out of his home for coming out as a gay and is seeking a place to stay for the night.  Again Ove’s sense of duty compels him to offer the boy a bed..

All the while, Ove is forced by circumstances and Parvaneh’s infectious insistence to have more interactions with the Persian woman and her homely concerns.  She persuasively insists that he adopt a stray cat in the neighborhood that he used to angrily hiss at every time he saw it.  And she also gets him to babysit for her two daughters while she is out.  Before long her kids are calling Ove “grandpa”. 

Ove’s innate sense of duty even spurs him to come to the aid of his former friend Rune.  Rune had recently suffered a stroke and was now paralyzed at home and tended to by his loyal wife.  But “white shirts” from a greedy rest home had now intervened with a government order to seize Rune and have him placed under their care.  However, Ove, with some outside help, manages to fend off the “white shirts” and enable Rune’s wife to keep her husband in her care.

All of this may suggest by the film’s end that, thanks mostly to Parvaneh, Ove has been humanized, that his inner, warm heart has finally opened up to humanity.  That is apparently how many people see the film – a heartwarming story of ultimate redemption.  In particular, the tale  may perhaps be seen as relating how a closed-up man was redeemed by a woman’s loving heart.  But I have some reservations about whether the film succeeds along those lines, despite the excellent acting performances of Rolf Lassgård as Ove, Bahar Pars as Parvaneh, and Ida Engvoll as Sonja.  In this respect we might compare A Man Called Ove to two other cinematic portrayals of a similar nature:

• Films of Ingmar Bergman, e.g. To Joy (1950), Summer Interlude (1951), Winter Light (1963), and Hour of the Wolf (1968)
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

From my perspective, A Man Called Ove compares unfavorably to Bergman’s films.  Although Bergman often has a despairing male figure who may be touched by a woman’s loving nature, he does open the viewer up to the existential loneliness of the man.  We can empathize with this man’s angst.  But Hannes Holm’s Ove is largely closed up and only seen from the outside as a curmudgeon.  We are less drawn into an empathetic feeling for the man, and his suicide attempts are only played for laughs.  So Bergman’s films have more depth.

Similarly, on the theme of redemption, A Man Called Ove doesn’t measure up to Goodbye, Mr. Chips.  In that earlier film, the stiff young schoolteacher Charles Chipping is brought out of his shell by his loving wife, Kathy.  Her love lastingly opens up his heart and redeems him.  In contrast, the two warm-hearted women in Ove’s life, his wife Sonja and Parvaneh, don’t really open him up and change him that much.  All they do is manage to point Ove’s compulsive sense of duty in various fruitful directions that appear to them.  But Ove, even to the very end of the story, remains his curmudgeonly self.  So I don’t feel Ove ever finds redemption in the way Charles Chipping did in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

Still, it’s nice to see Ove at the end of the film sleeping in his bed, with the once-despised stray cat lying next to him.
★★½

Notes:

1. Alissa Simon, “Film Review: ‘A Man Called Ove’”, Variety, (8 March 2016).  
2. Keith Watson, “A Man Called Ove”, Slant, (26 September 2016).  

“Coming Home” - Zhang Yimou (2014)

Coming Home (Gui Lai, 2014) is Zhang Yimou’s wistful reflection on love, memory, and the futility of bemoaning a tragic past.  In this case the tragic past concerns the period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s during which the Chinese people were subjected to brutal oppression in connection with such Maoist-led campaigns as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution [1]. Although the famous “scar literature” subsequently emerged that sought to expose wrongdoings of this period [2], it has always been difficult to discuss such matters inside China itself, due to government suppression of these topics. Nevertheless, Zhang Yimou has been able to make some dramas that have been set during these turbulent times by skirting overt political polemics and focusing instead on universal personal values.  This was also the case with Coming Home. 

The story of Coming Home is loosely based on the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi (2011) by well-known Chinese authoress Yan Geling, whose novella The 13 Flowers of Nanjing (Jinlíng Shísan Chai, 2011) had earlier been adapted by Zhang Yimou for his film The Flowers of War (2011).  Yan Geling’s novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi tells how the title character, a professor who dared to express his views, was extensively persecuted and forced to work in a prison work camp during the Anti-Rightist Movement and the subsequent Cultural Revolution.  Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation skips over all of those devastating elements and only covers the period at the end of the novel, when the main character is finally rehabilitated in 1979 and returns after a twenty-year absence  to a broken family that doesn’t even recognize him [3].  The film was criticized in some quarters for avoiding the presentation of controversial material about the Maoist dictatorship in order to please the Chinese authorities.  But Zhang may not have had much choice if he wanted to  have a film produced and distributed in the country.  In any case, I would say Zhang’s concentration on the period’s pervasive climate of fear and its devastating long-term effects (which are associated with the latter part of the novel) probably wound up being more subtle and powerful than any obvious depiction of tyrannical prison-camp brutality associated with earlier parts of Yan Geling’s tale [4]. 

A film about love and memory, and focusing almost exclusively on a middle-aged couple, needs strong but subtle acting performances, and Zhang chose two stellar performers for these roles  – Chen Daoming and Gong Li.  Chen Daoming is a well-known Chinese film and TV actor, who had earlier appeared in Zhang’s epic Hero (2002). Gong Li, of course, had been closely associated with Zhang Yimou’s early rise, starring in such films as Red Sorghum (1989), Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), and Shanghai Triad (1995).  But after that earlier close relationship, she had only appeared in one subsequent Zhang Yimou film, Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).  Here in Coming Home she appears as an unglamorous middle-aged woman, but she still retains her magnetic appeal. 

A third important role was that of the couple’s daughter, which was well played by newcomer Zhang Huiwen.  Her ballet-dancing background was undoubtedly a crucial qualification for the role, since her character is (like Yan Geling was, herself) a Cultural Revolution Red Guard dancer; but her acting performance in other respects is excellent, too. 

The film’s mood and pacing is slow and somber, almost dirge-like, and it benefits from Zhang Yimou’s customary superb cinematography (he started out his career as a cinematographer).  Although in earlier films his cinematic expression is often full of vivid coloring, here everything is muted and grey – almost oppressively so.  And this sustains the mood of melancholy.  This  moody atmosphere is complemented by the contemplative piano music score of Chinese composer Chen Qigang.

There is one aspect of Zhang Yimou’s mise-en-scene in this film that I found surprising, though,  and that was the relatively high number of jump cuts in the visual editing.  Normally when an editorial cut-on-action appears in a film, it has been motivated by the action in the story.  For example we see someone dropping something on the floor, and the next shot shows a downward-looking view of what was dropped.  The viewer doesn’t notice the visual discontinuity of the images, because the narrative flow motivates a desire to see the next perspective.  A “jump cut” refers to an editorial cut-on-action where the two successive shots are from more or less the same angle (the same camera axis) and the image size has not changed significantly.  So the cut was not motivated by the action and stands out to the viewer as a discontinuity.  Hence we feel that the image “jumped”.  Sometimes jump cuts are intentionally inserted into a film sequence, such as in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), in order to create a psychological effect of hectic discontinuity.  And indeed Zhang Yimou has, himself, sometimes used jump cuts in the past to create a emotional montage effect, such as in The Road Home (1999) when Zhao Di is hastily preparing a dinner for the new teacher, Luo Changyu.  But that kind of intention does not appear to be the story here in Coming Home.  Instead there are a number of unmotivated jump cuts, from closeup to medium shot for example, that are only distracting.  But never mind; the film’s virtues outweigh any such minor imperfections.

Coming Home’s story moves through four main phases.

1.  Professor Lu Yanshi breaks out

The time is around 1969, and dissident intellectual Lu Yanshi (played by Chen Daoming), imprisoned in a remote labor camp for unspecified reasons during the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-59), has just escaped from custody and made his way back to his home city in northern China.  He desperately wants to see his wife Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) and young teenage daughter Dandan (Zhang Huiwen), whom he hasn’t seen for ten years, but he knows the authorities will be waiting for him. The police fiercely warn Wanyu and Dandan not to collaborate with the criminal, and cast an aura of intimidation over the family.  Right away Zhang Yimou sets up a triangular separation for the three characters.  Wanyu and Lu are desperate to reunite, but Dandan, who hasn’t seen her father since she was three and who has been indoctrinated by then raging Cultural Revolution dogma, rejects her father as a traitor.  She is now a Red Guard ballet dancer seeking a lead role in an official production of the doctrinaire Red Detachment of Women ballet.

Lu manages to get a message to Wanyu to meet him at the train station so that they can runaway together, but the selfish Dandan wants to thwart the idea.  In an excellently choreographed sequence of ensuing triangular separation (Lu - Wanyu - Dandan/police) at the station, the couple try to escape.  But Dandan betrays them, and Lu is recaptured, while Wanyu is beaten and suffers a head injury.

2. Lu Yanshi returns
The action now shifts forward ten years to 1979.  Mao Zedong has passed away, the Cultural Revolution has been revoked, and leader Deng Xiaoping (who was once an enthusiastic supporter of the Anti-Rightist Movement) has approved the exoneration of thousands of past “Rightists”. Lu Yanshi, now rehabilitated, returns home, but finds his family in ruins. 

On Lu’s return, Wanyu is cordial on seeing her husband but doesn’t seem to recognize him.  Lu soon learns that she is suffering from psychogenic amnesia, a form of selective amnesia that can be caused by a traumatic event – in this case it was the tragic recapture of Lu at the train station ten years earlier. But we will later learn that there was another distressing episode that traumatized Wanyu.  In a frantic effort back then to save her husband’s life, she seems to have compromised her virtue with a Party official, Mr. Wang.  That infidelity is another horrible memory that must be obliterated.

In addition, Wanyu has cast Dandan out of her house and is barely on speaking terms with her daughter, who has given up her ballet aspirations and now works in a dingy factory.  Dandan’s banishment was because of her betrayal of her father and her subsequent destruction of every existing photograph of Lu from the family’s photo albums (which may have contributed to Wanyu’s forgetting what her husband looked like).

In other respects Wanyu appears to be normal, and she still works as a schoolteacher.  And she still passionately loves her husband; she just doesn’t think the real Lu Yanshi that has now approached her is actually that husband that she loves.

3.  Memory recovery attempts
Lu still loves his wife, too, and he is certain their old passion can be recovered if he can just get her to recognize him.  In some ways this is reminiscent of the situation depicted in Random Harvest (1942).  So Lu sets about trying successive ploys in an effort to get his wife to recognize him.

1st Ploy
Since Wanyu thinks her husband is still away at the prison labor camp, Lu sends her a letter as if from there to announce that he will be arriving by train on the 5th of the month.  She eagerly goes to the station to meet him, but she fails to recognize him as he emerges from the train.

2nd Ploy

Since Lu was a good piano player and Wanyu still has his old piano in their home, he presents himself to Wanyu as a piano tuner. After tuning the piano, he sits down and plays one of the pieces that he used to play for her.  This piano music, by the way, matches the melancholy soundtrack score that has served as a moody backdrop throughout the film.  Wanyu is touched by the music and for a moment seems to recognize him.  They embrace momentarily, but then she rejects the suddenly strange man who is touching her.

3rd Ploy

Lu manages to collect all the old letters that he had written to her while in prison but that were  never delivered, and he has them posted to her in a box.  Then he poses as a kindly neighbor who is willing to read the letters to her. Although Wanyu delights in listening to the letters read to her, she never makes the connection that the very man reading the letters is her longed-for beloved. 

Lu is getting despondent about all his vain efforts, but he decides to accept reality and see if he can somehow make the existing situation a little better.  So he starts inserting some freshly composed letters into the collected letter box.  These new letters, which Wanyu accepts as authentic messages from her dear husband, contain advice for her.  He urges her to reconcile with the now-repentant and more empathetic Dandan, and Wanyu does so.  Dandan, in turn, decides to return to her ballet dancing.

4.  Resignation

In the final movement of this sad composition, Yu finally learns about his wife and Mr. Fang.  At first Lu seeks revenge, but eventually learns that Mr. Fang is just another pawn that has been victimized in a heartless system.  He decides in the end to make the best of the existing circumstances and look after his damaged beloved in whatever way he can. 


Zhang Yimou’s dramatic meditation on love and memory in Coming Home is deeper and has a wider scope than a political polemic would have had.  The tragic circumstances that oppressive social forces can impose on people have consequences that can expose universal aspects of human existence.  They remind us of the fundamental nature of human relationships.  This film offers us a metaphor about love and the memories that are such an important part of it.

Essentially, our relationships with people are based on the narratives we have of them stored in our memories.  Sometimes over the course of a long relationship we hold onto the old narratives we have of people and overlook the here-and-now personage.  We fail to engage with the person sitting before us and instead imagine a past image from a remembered story.  I think men are more likely to do this than women.  They cherish the pretty young girl in their memories and overlook the here-and-now partner they are living with.  It is interesting that Yan Geling, a woman author who usually writes from the feminine perspective, has reversed the more customary gender roles in this story.  It is the man who is the here-and-now neglected partner in this story.

Like the principals in Random Harvest, Lu Yanshi is trying to recover the hallowed memory of a lost love.  But the outcome and reconciliation are different on this occasion, and perhaps this time they offer the kind of compassionate advice to all of us that can lead to our personal and collective salvation.  Seek not revenge, and love the one you’re with.
★★★½

Notes:

1.  Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, Random House (2005). 
2. “Scar literature”, Wikipedia” (27 February 2016).   
3. Yan Geling and Olivia Geng, “Writing China: Yan Geling, ‘The Criminal Lu Yanshi’”, China Real Time Report, The Wall Street Journal, (7 July 2014).   
4. Maggie Lee, “Cannes Film Review: ‘Coming Home’“, Variety, (21 May 2014). 

“The Road Home” - Zhang Yimou (1999)

Although deceptively simple, Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home (Wo de Fùqin Muqin –  literally: My Father and Mother, 1999) is one of the great filmmaker’s outstanding works. Zhang, who has worked successfully in a variety of cinema styles and genres, including social dramas, comedies, film noir, and Chinese wuxia martial arts, here seems to have just crafted a simple love story.  But across all the wide spectrum of Zhang’s work, he has always retained a certain common signature focus on an individual’s heartfelt struggles for authentic engagement.  As I remarked when once comparing Zhang to the equally great Michelangelo Antonioni,

“although the films of both of them [Antonioni and Zhang] may touch on the social sphere somewhat, they ultimately reach a more profound level that suggests the universal struggles of the individual soul in a heartless and uncaring cosmos.” [1]

And this is an underlying theme of The Road Home, too. 

The time of production (1999) seems to have been a particularly fertile period for Zhang.  The Road Home was the second of three relatively lighthearted films – the others being Not One Less (1999) and Happy Times (2000) – that he made in quick succession at this time, all in collaboration with cinematographer Yong Hou and music composer San Bao.  Coming after his breakup with favored actress Gong Li, these films featured new performers, and The Road Home was notable for introducing 20-year-old actress Zhang Ziyi in her first starring role.  All three films, concerned as they were with the lives or ordinary people, were, to my mind, superior to Zhang’s big-budget wuxia extravaganzas that immediately followed, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), which were both enormous hits at the box-office.

Zhang’s focus at this time on the lives of ordinary people and his sometimes use of amateur actor’s from the film settings’ locales, has led to comparison’s of his films with the Iranian so-called “neo-realist” renaissance during the 1990s.  In fact Zhang was an admirer of Iranian filmmakers and the way they were able to work under constraining circumstances [2]:

“Look, we think we have it hard here in China, but the pressures of Islamic Orthodoxy in Iran are far worse than anything we have to contend with here. But despite the pressures, Iranian directors succeed in making great films.”

But I wouldn’t characterize Zhang’s’ work as in any way neo-realistic.  His expressive mise-en-scene, including the music, is very carefully crafted to convey deep emotional feelings.  This is what makes The Road Home particularly moving – the naturally expressive cinematic conveyance of a person immersed in love.

The Road Home’s story concerns a young country girl’s falling in love with a new schoolteacher in a remote peasant village back in the 1950s, and it is based on the novel Remembrance by Shi Bao, who also wrote the screenplay.  It is told as a modern-day recollection of events that had happened some forty years earlier. 

In fact the film’s narrative structure is, itself, an interesting element.  The story begins in the “present” time with the schoolteacher’s son learning of his father’s recent death and returning from the city to visit his remote home village and attend to the funeral arrangements and to his grieving mother.  He then begins narrating in voiceover the locally famous story of how his parents met and fell in love.  The account then moves into a dramatized flashback, which makes up the bulk of the film.  Of course these couldn’t be the son’s memories; they could only be the mother’s recollections.  And accordingly the flashback focalization is entirely on the young woman’s experiences.  So what we see must either be a visualization of

• the woman’s (remembered) experiences and feelings associated with that story or
• the son’s imagination of the mother’s story that he heard her tell. 

And of course we viewers are, ourselves, imaginatively reconstructing the woman’s feelings based on the emotive visualization presented to us.  Nevertheless and given the son’s evident reserved demeanor, my inclination is to take what is presented in this film as a direct visualization of the woman’s experiences and not so much as the son’s imagined reconstruction of them.

The presentation of The Road Home comprises (a) an outer story set in the present and making up the beginning and closing portions of the film and (b) an inner story set some 40 years in the past and making up the middle portion of the film. The outer story is in matter-of-fact black-and-white and is essentially dry and mournful.  The inner story is in vivid colors (a Zhang Yimou specialty) and is full of vibrant, emotive feelings and expectation.

1.  The Son Comes Home (B/W)

Luo Yusheng (played by Sun Honglei) returns after a long absence to his home town, Sanhetun, in the snow-covered mountains in order to make arrangements for his father’s funeral.  His grieving mother, Zhao Di (played as the old woman by Zhao Yulian) insists that her husband’s burial be carried out in the bygone traditional way: his coffin is to be hand-carried down the long road to Sanhetun, with the pallbearers shouting along the way that this is the road home.  That way his departed soul will not get lost and remember its way home.   This demand presents a serious problem, because there are not enough young people in Sanhetun to serve as pallbearers.

While mulling over this difficulty, Yusheng comes across a 40-year-old picture of his mother and father when they were newlweds, and he lapses into a visual retelling of the famous story of their  falling in love.

2.  Di in Love (Color)

The remembered story, which makes up a little less than one hour of the film, recounts how 18-year-old Zhao Di (played as a young woman by Zhang Ziyi) met the town’s new, 20-year-old schoolteacher, Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao), in 1958.  This is told in a series of cinematically lyrical passages that convey the growing ardor of Di for Changyu.  Indeed, it is these lyrical vignettes that make up the heart and soul of the film [3].

In Zhang Yimou’s films love is often  blocked by two powerful forces: the coercive control of the authoritarian Communist state and the restrictive constraints of China’s conservative “no touch” indigenous culture.  In this film those two forces are present as well, but they are only in the background on this occasion.  The focus instead is on the two young people’s tentative romantic gestures within that traditional social context.  

This section of the film begins with the exciting arrival of the handsome young man who will be the village’s first schoolteacher.  Following the tradition that the prettiest girl in the village is to weave a banner that will be mounted in the schoolhouse’s ceiling, Di is designated to perform that task.  While the men are busy working on the construction of the new schoolhouse that will be used, the village women prepare their lunches, which are served buffet style.  This occasions the first (V1) of, by my count, six visual vignettes that are featured in this section.  These visual  vignettes are flowing montages featuring multiple slow-dissolves set to music which capture the feelings of the principals involved.  In the case of V1, we see Di carefully preparing her best dishes packed in what she feels is her signature bowl in the hopes that her offerings will be selected by the new teacher, Changyu.

Di also starts fetching her water from the village’s older and more distant from her home water well located near the new schoolhouse just so she can have a chance to catch an occasional glimpse of Changyu.  And even though she is illiterate and not interested in school lessons, she is so enthralled by the teacher’s voice that she stands every day outside the schoolhouse so she can listen to him.  (And she continued doing this over the entire forty-year course of their subsequent marriage.)

Every day after school, Changyu walks some of his students home.  So Di sits along the path, but in hiding, and watches them pass by.  This pattern of hopeful watching is shown in visual vignette #2 (V2).

Since Changyu has no family, the pattern is set up to have each household in the village take turns feeding him his dinner.  Finally it is the turn of Di, who lives at home with just her blind mother, to host him.  This gives Di and Changyu the opportunity to finally go beyond fleeting glances and actually exchange some words.  She invites him for some mushroom dumplings that evening, but  suddenly Changyu is peremptorily summoned back to the city for questioning by the government . Before his departure, though, he gives the infatuated Di a pretty red hair clip.  Changyu promises to stop by before leaving for a quick bite of her dumplings, but he is prevented from doing so and has to depart immediately in a horse-drawn carriage.  Di chases after them with her bowl of dumplings in a mad dash across the meadow (V3).  She eventually stumbles and falls, breaking  her special bowl and sadly discovering that she has somewhere lost her cherished hair clip, too.  She spends days retracing her steps across the meadow in a desperate attempt to find the clip, and eventually she does run on to it.  She also engages a pottery repairman who meticulously employs traditional  techniques to screw the pieces of her shattered bowl back together.  This is shown in an extended sequence of closeups giving the viewer a feel for the old ways of the village (V4). But Di is still morose about Changyu’s absence.

While waiting for the hoped-for return of Changyu, Di goes to the empty schoolhouse and lovingly spends time refurbishing the windows, as well as cleaning and beautifying the schoolroom (V5).  Then she stations herself out on the road in the middle of a snowstorm, desperately waiting for Changyu’s promised return (V6).  The whole village is now aware of her mad love for Changyu.  Di gets a fever from being out so long in the cold, but she stubbornly runs off down the road again anyway, hoping to find her beloved.  She is eventually found fainted along the side of the road and is carried back to the village, where she remains unconscious for two days. 

When Di finally awakens, she is informed that Changyu did manage to break out from custody in the city and sneak back to Sanhetun to see her briefly while she was still asleep.  However, as punishment for his insubordination, Changyu is forcibly returned to the city and kept from joining Di for another two years.  But after this he is finally able to return and marry his beloved.

3.  Changyu’s Funeral (B/W)
The story now returns to the present, and Yusheng, after his (and our) extended contemplation of his parents’ fabled courtship, decides to do whatever he can to fulfill his mother’s wishes for his father’s funeral.  In the event 100 people from miles around come to participate in the traditional transport of Changyu’s coffin and ensuing ceremony.  They want to ensure that the greatly respected teacher’s spirit can remember its road home.

The next day, Yusheng fulfills his mother’s request to teach a class to the village schoolchildren using his father’s original notebook.  Like the old days, Di stands outside the schoolhouse listening to her son’s delivery of the lesson.  This last scene is shot in vivid color, signifying a world reinvigorated by loving passion and commitment.


To most young people their parents are stolid representatives of authority and stability.  They have difficulty imagining how their parents could once have been in the throes of romantic love.  In Yusheng’s case, the famous story of his mother’s waiting for her beloved on the “road home”, which his mother evoked in his mind when she insisted on her “road home” funeral requirements, helped him imagine his mother’s passion.  And these thoughts may have opened up his own heart to the world around him, too.

Although set in a remote and traditional Chinese village, The Road Home evokes universal feelings of how romantic love can bloom in the heart.  In Sanhetun, as in many parts of the world, marriages were all arranged by the parents, and romantic couplings were unheard of.  The shy courtship of Changyu and Di lasted only about a month and did not involve any physical embraces of even touching.  They only exchanged meaningful gazes that struck chords in their hearts.  But love is a universal feeling and indeed an experience that involves the quintessential essence of who we are.  So it can arise anywhere there are pure hearts open to its call.  Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home, featuring Zhang Ziyi’s beautiful and astonishingly moving performance as Zhao Di, eloquently reminds us of that.

★★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “‘Raise the Red Lantern’ - Zhang Yimou (1991)”, The Film Sufi, (5 November 2009).   
2. I don’t have a direct source for this quotation, but it was quoted in:
• Dimitri Tsahuridis, “The Road Home”, Senses of Cinema, (July 2000).   
3. Andrew L. Urban, Louise Keller, David Thomas, “Road Home, The”, Urban Cinefile, (5 October 2017).   

Ang Lee

Films of Ang Lee:

• Eat Drink Man Woman - Ang Lee (1994)
• Lust, Caution - Ang Lee (2007) 
• Life of Pi - Ang Lee (2012)