The Road Home

In this age of special effects one-upmanship, ear-achingly loud soundtracks and camerawork that looks more informed by alcohol than planning, you can be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that it takes true filmmaking artistry to make you think you're not watching a movie at all. Fortunately, you have a reminder close at hand: Zhang Yimou's newest film, "The Road Home."

Despite and because of Yimou's considerable artistry, "The Road Home" seem less like a Film, determined to prove a point or explore an issue, than one of those elemental stories which capture and linger in our imagination. Its symbols are the type of symbols we face in our lives, its dilemmas those of ordinary people caught in their life-defining passions, and its materials nothing more than the expressive faces of (mostly) non-professional actors and the beautiful, forbidding landscapes they inhabit. Yimou has renounced what he feels is the recent subjugation of Chinese cinema to commercial spectacle, yet "The Road Home"'s sincerity and naturalness have more of an emotional impact than almost any gaudy production.

The film opens in black and white, showing a scene which probably wouldn't look much different in color: a dark SUV making a treacherous way across a snow-lashed landscape. Inside is Luo Yusheng, who is returning to the village in which he was raised. When he arrives, he finds out that his father Luo Changyu, a much-respected schoolteacher, has died some distance from the village in a snowstorm. His mother, Zhao Di, insists that Changyu be brought back to the village in accordance with tradition: by a group of local men who will carry the coffin by hand through the snowstorm and shout to Changyu that this is the road home, so he will not forget.

As Yusheng muses on how to accomplish this, the film blossoms into glorious color as he remembers the tales he has heard of his parents' eventful courtship: the young schoolteacher's eventful arrival from the city, the construction of the new schoolhouse, his beautiful mother's bashful love, and the political problems that kept them apart for what seemed like eternities. This passionate tale explains the overwhelming grief which Yusheng encounters among the villagers and his mother, and helps him to decide what to do when the film moves back into black-and-white and the realities of the dead must be dealt with.

Normally in films, black-and-white sections take place in the past, with the present blessed with the mircale of color. However, the reversal here is all to the gain of "The Road Home," emphasizing how the poignant, painfully real events of the first and third sections contrast with the lush semi-fantasy of the middle section's storytelling. Yimou directs the black-and-white sections with a delicate, tactful efficiency, perfectly balancing the moving, inarticulate verisimilitude of the non-professional actors with the reality that a bit of inarticulate verisimilitude goes a long way.

The middle section features professional actors, one of whom is Zhang Ziyi ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), as the young Zhao Di. Yimou has mastered the old but incredibly reliable cinematic trick of lavishly photographing a talented, gorgeous actress to move the story along and provide atmosphere at the same time, and Ziyi does as breathtaking a job in this role as Gong Li did for Yimou in many previous films. Ziyi is rivetingly watchable, and her youth - this was her first film, at age twenty - works well for her, as she is asked to ascend partway into maturity during the middle section. As she did in "Crouching Tiger," she makes the audience see the fear in her reticence and the passion in her fury, but she also displays a welcome charm and unsureness that make her seem real and almost knowable. This would be a star-making performance were she not a star already.

Throughout, Yimou's direction is virtually transparent; one does not feel that this film was directed so much as watched. But on reflection, you realize exactly why "The Road Home" feels that way: Yimou's natural, unhurried pacing, his feel for landscapes and the way action takes place in them, his close observation of a fine piece of cloth or a good meal. Nothing particularly extraordinary takes place in "The Road Home" - well, nothing besides true love - but Yimou's direction makes us see the nobility and beauty of what does happen, and makes us wonder how films could ever be about anything else.

All this creates a film which feels subtle at first, without many outward claims on your affections, but stays in your mind for many days afterward. This film has a jewel-like clarity about it such that, frankly, words seem but clumsy, over-violent tools to apprehend it. If you want a better idea of what I'm talking about, you'll have to go see "The Road Home."

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