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The Road Home is a recent film by one of the most justly celebrated auteurs in Chinese cinema, Zhang Yimou. It's a very quiet, almost glacially paced film, entirely lacking the social and emotional Sturm und Drang of Zhang's earlier films such as Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live. It's closer in tone (and plot) to his film The Story of Qiu Ju, and indeed, Zhang Ziyi's strong-willed peasant girl in Road bears what is often a remarkable resemblance to Gong Li's strong-willed peasant woman in Qiu Ju.
The Road Home begins with a man returning home from the city to the small village where his parents live. He has just been informed that his elderly father, the village schoolteacher, has unexpectedly passed away. Upon arrival, he discovers that his mother is insisting that the village pay its respects by following the largely abandoned custom of carrying the remains home from the hospital morgue on foot rather than by car or truck. From this point, the picture segues into a reminiscence of his parents' early life, moving from the black and white presentation of the present to the bright color of the past.
There's not a lot happening in this movie, to tell the truth. The camera is absolutely in love with Zhang Ziyi--not a bad choice, since she really is astonishingly lovely--but even that can only carry so far. Zhang doesn't really get a chance to demonstrate any of the fire and intensity that she deployed to such great effect in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and is instead left to act out her swiftly growing attraction for the newly arrived school teacher and her inarticulate despair when he's unexpectedly summoned back to the city (I can't resist pointing out that she runs like a complete spaz; I hope that's intentional...). She does a good job with what she's given, it's just that the script isn't nearly as helpful as it could be, providing little in the way of insight into motivation or feeling.
The Road Home is a calm, pretty little movie, but unfortunately not much more than that. It relies rather too much on voice-overs to explain where it's coming from, to the detriment of its dramatic urgency. Still, it's worth a viewing if one has a taste for a quiet examination of "first love" (very chaste, it must be noted--there's not even really a hint of physical desire) in a Chinese village.
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