By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.6
Director: Zhang Yimou
Original language title: Gui Lai
Country: china
Year: 2015
Running time: 109
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3125472/combined
Bruce says: “The opening scene of COMING HOME sets the tone. Pre-teen ballerinas are rehearsing – on point, pirouetting, and then crashing their rifles to the floor in unison. One of them is Dandan (Zhang Huiwen) who is suddenly called to the director’s office. There she finds her mother, Teacher Wu (Gong Li) and a group of Party Members. Dandan learns that her father, Lu (Chen Daoming), has escaped from forced labor camp during a prisoner transfer. The escape is deemed ‘rightist’ by one of the Party much as ‘leftist’ is used as a pejorative in this county by the Conservative Right. When Teacher Wu asks questions she is cautioned, ‘Who’s asking the questions here?’ Dandan cautions her mother not to see her husband, ‘You mustn’t see him; he is an enemy of the state.’
“Later that night a note is slipped under the door. ‘Meet me at the train station tomorrow morning.’ When Teacher Wu arrives at the station she searches desperately for her husband. She spots him just as he is being apprehended by authorities. She rushes to his side only to be beaten to the floor, suffering severe head injuries.
“Three years later the Cultural Revolution has ended and all prisoners are released. Prisoners of the state begin their journeys home. When Lu arrives at the station there is no one there to meet him. He goes to his apartment and discovers the door unlocked and no one home; inside there are strange notes on the walls. He patiently waits. When Teacher Wu arrives she does not recognizes him, thinking he is Mr. Fang – a local Party official who has repeatedly questioned her during her husband’s imprisonment. She slaps his face and tells him to get out of the apartment.
“Local Party members take pity on Lu and give him an abandoned store to live in. From his front door he can see the window of his old apartment. Dandan has moved away and is working in a textile factory. The mysterious notes in the apartment are there as reminders for his wife who Lu discovers is suffering psychogenic amnesia. In turns Teacher Wu thinks her husband is a piano tuner, a delivery man and a letter reader. He performs each role lovingly. She has a letter that states ‘I will arrive on Wednesday at the station.’ Each Wednesday she goes faithfully to meet her husband. The balance of COMING HOME focuses on how a family is reunited in a most fractured, delicate way.
“Zhang Yimou (RAISE THE RED LANTERN, JU DOU, TO LIVE, HERO, HOUSE OF THE FLYING DAGGERS has had a frustrating career. In spite of huge cultural advances in the past decade, China remains a cautious state; the film censors have not been lenient, particularly regarding Zhang’s films. COMING HOME is adapted from a novel about the devastating effects of the Cultural Revolution on one particular man and his family. While most of the novel focuses on life in the forced labor camps, only the last quarter was able to be filmed without fear of censorship. Zhang uses delicate lighting, close-ups that pay great attention to detail and a musical score featuring Lang Lang which is simple and beautiful. Zhang claims his first thought was to use Western music since many prisoners were punished for being educated in foreign lands. While doing research a popular Chinese song of the 1930s was discovered and a score was built around it.
“Gong Li has never been more precise in developing her character. Zhang says Gong Li accepts few film roles, choosing characters that present a challenge. For this role she spent several months at hospitals, studying the effects of amnesia. 4.5 cats
“COMING HOME screened at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.”
Jason says: “If COMING HOME were just the movie it looked like from the trailer for its American release, it would likely be worth seeing – Zhang Yimou and Gong Li have the track record together and separately that certainly suggests that they could elevate a simple medical weepy into something more than maudlin. As it turns out, that conventional story winds up less interesting than what goes on around it, which makes the film well worth standing alongside Zhang’s and Gong’s other great collaborations.
“It opens in 1975, with Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), a dissident who has been in prison for ten years, escaping while being transferred between trains in his hometown. Officials immediately come to his family – teacher Feng Wanyu (Gong Li) and daughter Dandan (Zhang Huiwen) – and impress upon them how important it is they turn him in should they see him. Several years later, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Lu is deemed ‘rehabilitated’ and released, but when Dandan picks him up at the train station, there is bad news: ‘Yu’ has developed a mental disorder that affects her memory, and her husband’s face is among the things she can’t remember.
“The opening act of COMING HOME is something approaching sublime in how it deals less with the principles involved – those are easy – than with the practical human reactions to the situation. Dandan is a gifted dancer, and this sequence plays out with the beautiful precision of a ballet, with the straight-backed daughter who grew up in this system seeming to flit between fealty to the state and loyalty to her mother, her movements complemented by how Lu sneaks around the apartment building and Yu attempts to watch her daughter and watch for her husband. This goes on against a situation built to push a teenager’s buttons, with Zhang and screenwriter Zou Jingzhi (working from Yan Geling’s novel) respecting the audience enough to keep things low-key; even as characters sometimes seem to reverse twice in a minute, everything is relayed elegantly, without pauses to explain the obvious.
“That first segment ends with Yu bleeding from the head after being tackled by the police and it’s clear that she’s not right when she is first seen a few scenes later, and while a visit to the doctor doesn’t draw that line, the audience is free to do so. Dandan living in the dormitory of the factory where she now works is much clearer; that incident poisoned everything for her. So the characters spend the rest of the movie working toward restoration, something treated like it should be easy: Lu is offered his old job as a university professor back, and people greet him on the street as if he hasn’t been a political prisoner for nearly twenty years. It’s obviously not going to be as easy as that, though, and there are times when it seems anger is much easier to hold on to than something more positive.
“It’s tempting to make this a movie about China rather than one in which the country’s history supplies essential background, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted. If so, it’s more conciliatory than most, containing a fairly strong message about how pining for what was may not be quite so practical as giving it up and starting anew – that trying to make things as they were may not always be doomed, but one can’t see anything less than that as failure. Of course, this applies to individuals just as well as nations, and it is to Zhang’s great credit that it works best and most definitively as the story of Wu, Lu, and Dandan, even if its truths do scale.
“Gong Li and Zhang Yimou have been working together long enough that it’s entirely-reasonable to imagine a late-1980s version of this film where Gong plays Dandan, especially since Yu is the least exciting character in a lot of ways. Gong doesn’t become a full parody of mental illness or even close to it, but there’s a hesitation to Yu that suggests her issues are more than memory. Then again, one wouldn’t necessarily want to displace Zhang Huiwen from her role; as in FOREVER YOUNG, she plays a dancer, and I wonder if she’s well-enough known for this in China that seeing her relegated to the back of the troupe feels especially unjust. She’s excellent regardless, infusing the younger Dandan with ambition and simple loyalty, and allowing it to peek out from under the layers that the older Dandan has built up. It’s especially beautiful to watch her play against Chen Daoming, who makes sure that Lu’s dignity is modest, as is his true love for each of these ladies. If this character were put on a pedestal, than neither one of his two very different attempts to reconnect would be as powerful.
“Indeed, though the advertising plays up the most recent reunion of Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, COMING HOME may be more worth watching because Zhang Huiwen could be the next Gong Li – and even if she isn’t, the father/daughter material is just as strong as the woman nobly suffering from cognitive disability. 5 cats
“Seen 15 October 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP).”
Thom says: Zhang Yimou (JU DOU, RAISE THE RED LANTERN, HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, UNDER THE HAWTHORN TREE, & THE FLOWERS OF WAR has long been one of the world’s greatest film directors, working throughout his career in China. One of the most remarkable things about this professional, amazing, breathtaking talent is his variety of content. He’s shown himself capable of mastering so many genres: action, adventure, fantasy, history, documentary, drama, comedy, romance, tragedy, gangster, film noir, ballet, thriller, war, crime, martial arts, you name it, he’s mastered it. This film is of an unforgettable, tragic nature that haunts my visions of the true vicissitudes of life. Tragedy does hit us all in one way or another but rarely to such an empowering nature as it does to this poor protagonist. Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming) & Feng Wanyu (the incomparable Gong Li) are a devoted and loving couple with a young, troubled, nasty daughter who squeals on her dad to the authorities. As he tries to flee he is captured at a train station by security forces and sent to a labor camp. His wife hurries to the train station to warn him but once there, has a horrible accident that results in a selective amnesia that affects the rest of her life.
“Soon after the Cultural Revolution the husband is finally released and all he wants to do is re-connect with his beautiful wife. Tragically, while psychologically she is in desperate need of her ‘missing’ husband, she never recognizes Lu as her partner. He does everything in his power and imagination to convince Feng to absolutely no avail. He moves close to her, is always there for anything she might need and is forever coming up with new ways to turn-the-tide. If the film had completely embraced the dirge-like tone on this ongoing tragedy it still would have been a classic but what rises it above to the higher level is the character of the daughter who manages to outlive her stench of treachery to become a willing participant in helping her father achieve his fervent desire and transform herself into a lovely woman. 5 cats”