Movie of the week: “The Road Home”
Heart of porcelain
Long gone are the days when oriental productions were limited to kung-fu films from Hong Kong. Many films that have come from Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, China and South Korea are of a quality level to make jealous Hollywood.They are pearls such as the Vietnamese “Three Seasons”, the Korean “The Housemaid”, and the Chinese “Not One Less” and “Chinese Box”. They are joined by Yimou Zhang’s “The Road Home”, which also directed “House of Flying Daggers” and “The Great Wall”.
The movie story is of a frightening simplicity: a young man returns to his native village upon receiving the news that his father has passed away. The old man was the only teacher in the village, where he had taught for forty years. Upon arriving home, the man discovers that his mother wants to be fulfilled an old tradition of the region: the dead must be led on foot so that it does not get lost on the way home.
In this return to his place of origin, the young man relives the love story of his parents. In the place and the time in which they lived, all marriages were negotiated by the families. Di (Ziyi Zhang), an uneducated young woman from the countryside, had already refused several candidats. When young and urban Changyu (Hao Zheng) arrives to be the local teacher, she falls madly in love with him.
Indifferent to this cultural abyss that separated them, Di almost dies – literally – because of this love. So far, nothing that has not been seen a thousand times in the movies.
The difference of this film is the delicate treatment that is given to the relationship of the two young people. Unlike our soap operas, where young people go to bed at the first meeting, the behavior of Chinese youngsters may even seem ridiculously naive. It is not, at least for anyone who can share the innocence of a first love.
The film is beautiful, the landscapes are breathtaking, the music is soft and mellow, and the romance is delicate and painfully real. It is not without reason that we felt the pain of Di when breaking the porcelain vase that contained the delicacies for his beloved man. When it breakes, the heart of the girl and all her beautiful dreams were also broken.
In this universe still lives the mother who had lost the vision of so much crying her husband’s loss, but she is able to see what the others did not do. It is her initiative to have the broken bowl repaired, of inestimable value to the girl.
In the quest to satisfy the mother’s will, the teacher’s son ends up finding much more than he sought. The value of his father, the friendship and appreciation of unknown or long-forgotten people, as well as the very roots he had thought he had cut. It was not just his father’s corpse returning home. Romance, culture and tradition lead him to the ultimate homage to the old teacher.
This movie, which was not released in the United States in video, had an excellent Brazilian version on DVD. The original cinema format allows enjoying the beautiful cinematography, and the audio in Mandarin allows to listen to the curious musicality of the Chinese language. Unfortunately there are no extras, but this is a case where the content of the movie is already very good. The soundtrack is a spectacle by itself, with soft melodies very well integrated to the images.
The actress who personifies the young Di is Ziyi Zhang, practically debuting in the cinema, and that later would make numerous successful films, like “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”, “Hero”, “House of the Flying Daggers”, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and the recent “The Cloverfield Paradox”.
This film winned the Golden Lion of the Berlin Festival and the Audience Award of the Sundance Festival, besides another fourteen awards and six nominations.
“The Road Home”, in addition to being a sensitive and agreable movie, portrays the rural China at a time very far from the modern powerful nation of our days, but reminds us that love is universal and transcends generations.I recommend it to everyone.