On Coming Home by Zhang Yimou

This was a touching film. I was entranced by the affection between Gong Li and the male protagonist. I felt the film really starts after his re-arrest. Up to that point is backstory. Yet the pace and poignancy of the sequence before they reach the train station, then at the train station is superb. The film then slows down and deals with the aftermath of that one day. Coming Home is a deep rumination about memory and loss. What we lose due to time or age and cannot be brought back. Except in this film it is the subject of the Cultural Revolution. Yimou doesn't directly address the politics of the Cultural Revolution. But I detected that he shows the Cultural Revolution in a very negative light. The government is manipulative of the teenage age girl. Another man from the government rapes Gong Li. The professor was sent away for more than a decade. These scenes are shown but not gone into or talked about much. Perhaps not since Farewell My Concubine does a film address the Cultural Revolution. In Concubine it is addressed only at the end of the film. Here it is the setting and the defining historical setting for the entire film.

The performances are phenomenal. I thoroughly enjoyed Gong Li as a woman who can't remember. Her performance was heartfelt and emotionally gripping. Several scenes were memorable. The scene in the beginning where the husband has escaped from a prison camp and returned home is great. He is standing outside. Not sure if he can go in. His wife is standing there with a Mao statue on a mantle the door in front of her. Yet she doesn't open the door to see who is there. Tears come to her eyes, she looks at the police agent outside her window, yet she can't open the door for her husband. In the time of Maoist extremism I'm sure there were many of these kinds of stories. In fact Deng Xiaopeng's son was pushed out of a window and permanently disabled by red guards. If China is a World power now, it certainly wants to forget the Cultural Revolution. Which is the point of the film. To move forward memories must be dealt with. The hang over of Maoist excess has never been thoroughly addressed by the government. And until it is addressed people like Gong Li's character will remain afflicted with memory loss and deep psychosis.

The other great scene is the railway station where Li's character goes to pick up her husband every 5th of the month. I think the use of it repeatedly brings forth it's emotional aspect. People stream over the train railing, but her husband never comes. Instead he turns into a letter reader and becomes a very good friend of her's. It also shows how traumatic the events of her husband's escape from a camp was. She can't move forward from those memories. Yet they are so painful she can't recall them.

Great film from a great director.