Walking through the movie "The Road Home" by Chinese director Zhang Yimou about a mountain village girls' developing relationship with a visiting teacher, it reminds you of extended stays in Mount Pulag in Decembers.
While the movie is on Asian woman with great courage and inner strength, the setting in "China's unbridled beauty, long plain, lush grasslands, young forest" combined with a simple story and uncomplicated lives bring out successfully these virtues we need these days.
Mountaineers, or even excursionists can be engrossly involved in The Road Home. Like the central character Zhao Di, we can relate. We manage to live simply with water, basic food, a focused goal, committed relationships. With the mountain as the base, we just walk and walk and walk. Courage and strength show up when we face obstacles, not giving up until we reach our goal. After every adventure, ultimately we trace back to the road home, our jump offs, homes and families.
Catch this award winning movie in your local theaters. I saw it at Megamall Preview Room 8 November 2000. Tochs.
Diana Ong's Review
Beautiful photography coupled with lilting music tell a simple and touching love story between a teacher and a bold village lass in The Road Home.
The movie starts in bleak black-and-white when narrator Luo Changyu is called home from the city for his father's funeral. Back at home in Sanhetun, a secluded Chinese village in the mountains, he's faced with a thorny problem. His mother wants men to carry his father's corpse back to the village on foot (a time-honoured tradition) so that his father's soul knows the road home.
But more importantly, his mother wants to take one last walk with his father on the road that has marked the beginning of their love. The problem is that all young and able-bodied men have long left the village for the glittering city life and there is no one to carry out the tradition.
Just when they may have to resort on dragging the corpse back on a tractor, Changyu recalls the old story of how his parents met. And at this point the movie explodes in warm, glorious colors in great contrast to the bleak, dull picture painted for us so far.
Flashback: it is 1958 and village beauty Zhao Di is smitten with the new lanky teacher who just came in from the city - Luo Yusheng. Nursing her secret passion, the young lass cleverly schedules her daily habits around Mr Luo's life. Her labours of love include taking the long route to the well near the school in order to hear him teach, and waylaying him on the mountain roads. Such dedicated efforts do not go unnoticed but just as Mr Luo seems to reciprocate, he is whisked away by the Chinese government.
Zhang Ziyi lends credibility to her role as the bold and obstinate Zhao Di who waits for her beloved to return in a raging snow-storm. Like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ziyi defies social conventions to get what she wants and keeps her vulnerability intact at the same time. It's a graceful re-enactment of director Zhang Yimou's favourite film character - the Asian woman with great courage and inner strength (Ju Dou, The Story of Qiu Ju).
Director Zhang Yimou appears to have sidetracked somewhat from his earlier and more political works, The Road Home has political overtures but they resonate only faintly in the film. Instead, film art takes top priority as Zhang turns this simple love story into highly enjoyable cinematography. He takes us on a poignant and slow exploration of China's unbridled beauty - large plains, lush grasslands, young forests - and some of her antiquated trades - pottery-mending and sewing on looms.
This tour de force is as much a touching love story as a documentary on the old Chinese village life and both aspects are a joy to watch. If you are a Zhang Yimou or Zhang Ziyi fan, you will not be disappointed with The Road Home.
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