The Road Home; Directed by Zhang Yimou. Written by Bao Shi, from his novel Remembrance. With Zhang Ziyi, Zheng Hao, Sun Honglei, Zhao Yuelin, and Li Bin. A Sony Classics release. In Mandarin with English subtitles. At the Avon.

The road from the city leads the narrator through the prairie and back to the village where he was born. He's returning to make arrangements for the funeral of his father, who died after being caught far away in a snowstorm. It turns out that his mother wants her husband's coffin borne home in the traditional way, on foot, but there are hardly any young men left in the village -- they've all moved to the city. While he's pondering how to fulfill his mother's wish, he reflects on how his parents met, some 40 years earlier, and it's this flashback to their courtship that constitutes the body of Zhang Yimou's The Road Home.

Sounds a little like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance -- and indeed, Zhang's Silver Bear winner from last year's Berlin Film Fest could be a John Ford Western. It has in Sanhetun a small, poor North China village inhabited by ordinary men (just two women in the movie) who are unsophisticated and not overbright but goodhearted, which for Ford is what counts. It has Ford's respect for traditional values. And it has a love story that's the more powerful for being stripped to essentials, the kind you don't find in Pearl Harbor or Moulin Rouge.

The Road Home likewise recalls John Ford in its deceptive simplicity. Zhang films the long flashback segment in kaleidoscopic color (Hou Yong is the cinematographer) but the contemporary frame in a grainy black-and-white. That's his comment on the anonymity of modern-day China, but he may also be suggesting that life remembered (or imagined) sometimes takes on colors it didn't have when it was experienced. Then there's his choice of Panavision: it seems the wrong shape for a love story, but when he closes in on Zhao Di or Luo Changyu, he's reminding us that it takes two persons to fill a widescreen frame.

Changyu (Zheng Hao) is the 20-year-old schoolteacher who's come to Sanhetun because he couldn't find work in the city. Pigtailed 18-year-old Di (Zhang Ziyi -- no relation to the director), the most beautiful girl in the village, has rejected all offers of an arranged marriage (that being the norm then), but she falls for him at first sight; she loves even the sound of his voice as he teaches, though she has no interest in going to school. Their first meetings are the aw-shucks foot-scuffing kind. Di starts drawing water from the well that's farther from the village but close to the school, and when Changyu comes to dinner (the villagers take turns feeding him), she rustles up her best dishes. She also weaves the red banner that's hung from the school rafters for good luck. Seeing her at the well, he tries to draw water himself so he can talk to her, and when he's called away for unspecified political reasons, he gives her a barrette to go with her red quilted jacket.

Changyu leaves so suddenly that he misses out on the mushroom dumplings Di had made for him, so she wraps them up and goes running after the horse cart, as if she could overtake it by sheer force of will (or through, as in run-of-the-mill American Westerns, directorial deus ex machina). She can't, of course, and neither does standing out in the snow and waiting on the day he's expected to return bring him back. In desperation, Di pulls on her boots and tries to trek to the city (probably days away on foot), but she collapses by the roadside and has to be carried back home with a high fever. Her determination is a kind of obsessiveness: like the 13-year-old substitute teacher Wei Minzhi in Zhang's previous film, Not One Less, she keeps trying to make reality conform to her wishes, and Zhang doesn't portray this stubbornness as an unmitigated virtue. Minzhi isn't always likable, but her persistence pays off when a city TV station finds her missing student (and in the process helps itself to big ratings). Di triumphs for a better reason: Changyu loves her. Although the bureaucrats aren't finished with him, he returns to the village to see her; his unauthorized departure results in a two- year delay before they're allowed to marry.

Like the courtship of Wyatt Earp and Clementine Carter in My Darling Clementine, or Michael O'Rourke and Philadelphia Thursday in Fort Apache, this is primal, idealistic stuff. Di and Changyu know as little about each other as we know about them; there are no compatibility profiles or computer match-ups here, just two young persons with nothing in common beyond their eagerness to please each other. And Zhang would have us believe that's enough. What the nuances of their shy-but-hopeful facial expressions don't tell us, his cinematography does. Di is most often seen in a pink quilted jacket, but the red one is Changyu's favorite (no subtlety in Zhang's color symbolism); and when she's framed by yellow-flowering birches (a traditional symbol of fidelity) as she watches Changyu from a distance, there's no need to say more. San Bao's score, with its low flutes, is discreet; often the soundtrack gives us nothing more than a whisper of wind. It's love and filmmaking at their most basic.

Back in the black-and-white present, Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei) has hauled out his mother's old loom -- the only one left in the village -- so that she can weave a cloth for her husband's coffin, just as she did for his school. Yusheng has also decided to pay 36 men from nearby villages to carry the coffin -- but when word gets out, some hundred of his father's old students turn up (from as far away as Guangzhou), and they won't accept any money. It's a Ford touch, the common people rising to the occasion, and so is the long shot of the funeral procession that snakes through the snowy landscape, man dwarfed by nature but ennobled by the esteem of his fellow men. The money that would have paid for this procession instead goes toward building a new school, but not even that gesture is enough to make the film bloom with color. And when the now old Di (Zhao Yuelin) tells Yusheng how much they missed him, you begin to realize that he hasn't been the ideal son, disinclined to follow in his father's footsteps (he seems to be in business), too busy to visit or write, too busy to find a girlfriend. By tradition, everyone along the funeral-procession route yells at the coffin so the deceased won't forget the road home, but here it's Changyu's son who's lost his way.

So in the final sequence, Yusheng does what his mother says will make his father happy: he teaches a day of school. This won't change his life, but it enables Di to hear her husband again. And that does push the film back into color, the young Di in her red jacket running down the yellow-lined road once more, the road that leads us home to love.

Issue Date: September 7 - 13, 2001