The Road Home (1999)
literal translation: My Mother and Father
cast: Zhang Ziyi, Sun Honglei, Zheng Hao, Zhao Yuelin, Li Bin, Chang Guifa, and Sung Wencheng
director: Zhang Yimou

Finding your true love is both a dream and a nightmare. When you find the person you are to spend the rest of your life with it feels like a fairy tale. Love turns into a nightmare when you are separated from that person for days, weeks, and even years before you are reunited.

Then your life cycle stops turning and you are separated from that person on earth for an eternity.

Zhang Yimou's "The Road Home" is that fairy tale and that nightmare. Similar to "Not One Less," Zhang's latest opera of Chinese fate opens during present day in a village isolated from a near-by city only connected by a dirt road long enough for a day's journey on foot. The road is also filled with hills and often Mother Nature can be a cruel hearted spirit.

Returning from the city, Luo Changyu (Zheng) discovers his elderly father was trapped in a snowstorm and passed away from a heart condition he was unaware of. His body is being kept at a hospital in the city. From the insistence of his wife (Zhao) her husband is to be laid to rest in the village. Her husband was the village schoolteacher and a widely respected man. The people of the village respect her wishes and plan to move the coffin by car or tractor, but she refuses--he is to be carried back on foot--to travel the road home one last time.

Through voice-over narration Luo Changyu describes the nature of his parents' love and how their first meeting, which was a well-known affair throughout the village.

In her first major role Zhang Ziyi (now of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" fame) stars as Di--future mother of Changyu--who is now only an 18-year-old village girl with a beautifully innocent smile that warms the heart every time it mugs the screen. When a new teacher comes to the village from the city Di knows she has found true love. They never speak, but from the moment she sees him from the sidelines of his entrance into the village she knows...

Di spends countless hours on the sidelines with the rest of the women (Changyu describes this period of Chinese culture as superstitious and women are not to be allowed to work with men--it is not their place). Enthralled with the presence of Teacher Luo (Zhao), barely into his 20's whom always smiles back..., then looks again, and smiles, Di literally encompasses her entire life around the young teacher who she silently is begging to show his interest in her.

Though village law at this time upheld the right to match making and governed men and young women under it their relationship begins with implicit behavior that lasts for what seems a lifetime to Di. Though fate intervenes in the form of class status, city politics, and the bite from deathly winters after time there is no denying the respect between the teacher and the young village girl. In fact, Di's demonstration that she is willing to wait a life time for Yuo only brings the couple implicitly closer until it bursts at the seems during the film's climax.

Like so many Zhang Yimou films "The Road Home" is beautifully photographed with the lush landscape of a Chinese autumn and the harsh bitterness of a Chinese winter in an isolated village during the early 20th century.

However, Zhang oddly chooses to film the present day footage in black and white, which causes it to feel slightly off kilter at times, there's no denying the power of the cinematography during the voyage home toward the film's conclusion.

Other familiar and welcomed gems of Zhang Yimou include a watchful eye of adolescent performers (it's not a wonder that Zhang Ziyi continues to be a sought after talent in Asia and in North America), a heart warming musical score, and tear jerking script penned by Bao Shi who provides the film with its source (based from his novel "Remembrance").

Though "The Road Home" more or less speaks for itself--true to all of Zhang's work--the out-of-place voice over narration makes the film a cut below the rest of the director's stable of films that have all been anywhere from highly recommendable to masterpieces.

"The Road Home" with all of its near-greatness should not be a missed opportunity to fans of Zhang's work nor audiences in general.